Monster Mash Up
by Cinders and Brimstone
Summary: Completely AU take of the entire Silas, Expression, and the Dark Bonnie mess. There will be blood. And gore. And foul language. And witty banter. And people exploding on front lawns. Bonfires. Crucifixions. And dungeons. Maybe some DubCon? Unhealthy sexual tension. Psychological, physical torture. Utter destruction to the infrastructure of Mystic Falls... And jaywalking.
1. Scream

_**AN: hey peeps. Long time no see. Busy, busy, like a butterfly in springtime. (Me, butterfly, ha!) SO… been a while since I attempted a TVD flick. I just love Polyester so much, it completes me. It completes Bamon for me. All my Bamon fantasies are satiated, in a way. Whenever I start jonesing, I just pick out a bamon at random… Some really good Bamon out there!**_

_**But lately, I started in on the klonnie train. Klonnie could be fun, and it's less farfetched than Klaroline, so I decided, fuck it, write a badass klonnie. I'm going to try something completely different to what I did in Polyester cause that was like a year ago and my style kinda changed a bit because I went off practising screenwriting and my ability to write anything resembling structured prose has degenerated to ash.**_

_**But heh, who cares right? **_

_**Sorry for taking down that fic I had started, Hunter x Hunter x Witch. I was so busy, I literally had ZERO time for myself. ZERO. Imagine soldiers off at war living in a camp eating canned food… I was surviving on carrot, cucumber and peanut butter, with an hour and a half sleep every other night. Hard times. **_

_**Sad times.**_

_**But the sad times are almost over, and it's Christmas, and I have one week off, so wtf? Right? Start a fic, right?**_

_**I'm telling you up front, Updates ain't going to be rapid fire, because I have finals in May and five years of work to cram.**_

_**I'm just going off on my own storywise. So this will end up being vastly different from the actual series because I won't be trying to go along with the series when it starts back. This is like an independent fanfic (oxymoron?) I'm just going to make up some random plot about Silas and the cure and "Expression" and all that because somehow, I think I'll prefer my version to whatever crap TVD writers try to feed me. Sire bond? Really? The only reason I watch now is to hear/see Klaus and to hope that Bonnie gets at least 5 min of storyline. I'm going to try to make Klaus a fun, cray-cray character, but I still want him to be different to Damon from Polyester, so warn me if the characters are too similar, kay?**_

_**And feedback is not only requested this time. It is required! **__**Mandatory.**__** Even if you're not signed in, drop a comment, even if it's to say "meh". (Please). If you want to be uber critical put it in a pm, probably. But seriously, REVIEWS!**_

_**And I'm suffering from some transient dyslexia (the keyboard is so unfamiliar, I haven't written in forever!) Forgiveness for any and all errors. It is human to err. Divine to forgive…**_

**Disclaimers and all that jazz…**

* * *

_Oops_.

Klaus paced up and down the aisle.

_Jesus Christ._

There he was, pristine on his cross looking down on him with that perpetual frown.

_Yeah, I fucked up._

Fucked up didn't even begin to describe what he'd done. Letting himself get desiccated had been fucking up. Daggering his family for centuries on end, that was fucking up. Not killing Stefan. Not killing Damon. _That _was fucking up. His mother coming back from the dead in order to kill them all, that was fucked up. Finn volunteering to help…

_This_, though. This was on a whole different level.

_He _was the one who'd set in all in motion.

If he could time travel, he'd go back in time to that day when he saved Connor from the trap. That whole Sword-Hunter-Silas-Cure shit… How could he fall for it?

How in the fucking _hell_ had _he_ fallen for that same fake-ass prophecy bullshit? He was the one to come up with the idea of fake-ass prophecies! And he'd let someone use that same trick on him?

He should kill himself.

Seriously, he should.

He should kill _somebody_…

Except people to be kill were starting to become a scarce commodity.

Klaus looked around the church. Stefan Damon and Elena, the three rats who never go down with the ship. Jeremy, the ever-persistent, multi-gifted/cursed emo teenager. Shane… And the Sherriff…

_She's expendable…_

He flash-stepped behind her, grabbed her scrawny little neck with both his hands and just ripped her head off.

Not even a sound.

Not even the scream of a dove.

_Scream of a dove?_

"What the hell are you doing?" Stefan yelled.

Damon had the good sense to stay quiet.

"What's it look like I'm doing, love?" Klaus replied, smirk in place, as he held the sheriff's decapitated body over the basin of holy water. The blood poured and mixed with the water beautifully. _Beauty._

Life without beauty is nothing.

"I hadn't had the chance to grab breakfast, I'm a bit hungry. Nervous stomach, me."

"What do you have to be nervous about?" Damon, the smartest most genius vampire ever asked, "You're the one who's immortal. You can walk right out of here."

_Yeah?_

He didn't want to gamble on it.

"The Witch-Bitch has devoted the last year of her life to killing me, and now that she's actually gone batshit insane with power, you want me to just put myself in harm's way? To jump into the arms of death itself?"

He should, though.

In 1192, when he'd been spending some time in Japan playing Go with the new Shogun, Minamoto no Yoritomo, they'd talked a bit about seppuku. Minamoto had said that he'd consider it if word ever got around that he was a practising homosexual.

Klaus wouldn't kill himself if people thought he was a homosexual. He wasn't. He'd not had a single gay encounter in his life, but he could understand it. There was a certain beauty to the male body as compared to the female. A male had power. Virility. Prowess. _And _beauty.

He'd often thought about becoming a homosexual. Just for the fun of it. Just to say he'd tried everything twice. He could appreciate a beautiful man as well as the next homo. Take Damon, for instance. For all intents and purposes, the sexiest man west of the Greenwich Meridian…

_And what was I thinking about…_

Yes. That he'd never once ever considered killing himself. Even when he was under the Hunter's Curse, he'd never even come close to putting his own lights out. Kicking over your own bucket, as they say. As empty as his life was, as boring, as monotonous, as devoid as it was of love or any true emotion, as plagued with surprising but inevitable betrayals… he'd never once considered suicide.

He was a thousand years young and looking forward to ten thousand more. Maybe when he was old(er) and grey (less blond) he might think about it seriously. When he'd literally fucked/fed on every woman in the world, maybe? And funny thing about women, they reproduced. A new woman was born every 6 or seven seconds. Renewable resource, them womenfolk.

_If he ever douched it up on such a level again?_ Yeah. He'd kill himself. Light a candle, sharpen up a kitana and spill his guts in the back yard.

The torrent of blood from Liz Forbes neck slowed to a trickle, then drops. He let the body drop to the floor, walked over to the water cooler, took a paper cup walked back over to the basin of holy bloody water and scooped out a cup. Then casual as any monster, took seat on the pew next to Shane. Atticus Shane. Puppet-master. King Manipulator. Badass Hypnotizing Motherfucker.

He'd played them all, hadn't he? The soft-spoken, thirty-something, curly-haired, gypsy-looking school teacher.

_Shame on me._

But what was it that the humans had a way of saying, '_fool me once, shame on you'_?

_Shame on you, Atticus Shane. Eternal shame and ignominy upon you._

_And just a little shame on me, because really._

A warlock named Silas gets a witch friend of his to co-write an immortality spell with him. He uses it on himself and presto, Warlock is immortal. Warlock tries to used spell on his main squeeze, and the secondary squeeze, (witch who co-wrote the spell) goes all "hell hath no fury" and flat out murders the main squeeze and imprisons Mr All-Powerful Warlock in a tomb forever.

Meanwhile, massive centuries later, _another _witch, most likely a Bennett, sacrifices her life (as Bennett witches are wont to do) to create five super humans called Hunters (note the capital H) whose sole purpose in life is to kill vampires. And when they kill a vampire they get a tattoo. The more they kill, the more the tattoo grows. And when it all grows together you get a map.

And every good witch map needs a decipher code, so there's a magic sword too to help with that.

And the map leads to _"The Cure."_

Also, the map leads to Silas… making Silas and _"The Cure"_ one and the same?

And the only way to open the tomb of Silas/ get the cure is for Bonnie to learn a special _extra_ _dark_ dark magic called "_expression."_

And Atticus, the Gypsy/Moor is just your friendly neighbourhood college professor of occult studies who just happens to _know_ where the tomb is, (making the map and the sword utterly useless), and also just happens to be an expert at hypnotizing seventeen year old girls and teaching them "_expression". _Which is necessary for the opening of the tomb of Silas/ obtaining the cure, which he needs to turn Elena back to a human, to make more hybrids.

_Ergo…_

_Concordantly… _

Oh, and also, human sacrifice is necessary. Vampire sacrifice is necessary. Hybrid sacrifice is necessary. Really… it doesn't matter what you kill, or who does the kill as long as there are twelve dead bodies in the end. So Shane takes the liberty to sacrifice a good baker's dozen (12 not 13) of Mystic Falls population. Repeatedly. All in the name of powering up Bonnie's _"expression". _And damn the questions_, right?_ All so that he can get more hybrids, just because he was bored, basically, and wanted to have a fun adventure with Steff-Steff, his bro from another mo.

He'd not really wanted the hybrids, shitty bunch of weak disloyal fucks as they were. Being honest.

He'd killed a whole lot of them himself…

And he really didn't give much of a fuck about Elena, or "_The Cure", _or Silas, the Great and the Powerful.

What he _did _give a fuck about was not looking like an ass. And that was what was happening. Shane, the Gypsy-Moor had him holed up in a church like some twisted fucking version of Anne Frank. Sure he could brave it, test the waters, step outside and let fate have its way with him…

Or he could go ape-shit and kill everybody else who was witness to this little goof. Stefan, Elena, Damon, Shane, Jeremy. Nobody's laughing at him if he just goes ape-shit and kills everyone.

Or he could play cool…

As if nothing mattered.

_Nothing really matters…_

How fucked up is the world when the _vampires_ are hiding out on holy ground?

"So," Klaus sipped his beverage. Watered down a bit, but still good. Liz Forbes, _rest in peace_. Mother of the beautiful, but treacherous, Caroline Forbes, (also dead, _rest in peace despite your constant backstabbing_). "Since we're all apparently dancing to the tune of your flute, how about you educate me on the steps so I don't look clumsy on the dance floor."

"Klaus," the man greeted him. As if they were random normal human beings. The fucking nerve.

"Professor," Klaus crooned, having fun for some reason.

It was hard to describe, but he was strangely happy. For some strange unknown and unfathomable reason. Excited. Borderline aroused, in fact.

And it had nothing to do with the gypsy's marvellous complexion and casually tussled locks.

Nothing to do with Stefan, the Ripper/the Brooder.

Nothing to do with Damon Bright-Eyes.

Nothing to do with Elena, the vampire princess.

Nothing to do with ripping Liz's head off… Okay, maybe a little to do with that, but mostly he felt it was due to the electricity in the air. The mayhem. The raw bloodlust. The chaos.

The church was like a trench. In a battlefield.

War.

It had been a long time since he'd had something to fight.

A long time since he'd cared about anything, and now… now he was a bundle of excitement and fear and anxiety and….

_Oooh…._

Death.

_Exciting._

_Motivating. _

_Arousing?_

If death was a person, would he fuck it?

Because, basically, that's what had happened. Bonnie Bennett had become _walking_ _death_.

_Grim Reaper. _Minus the scythe, and the robes. A hotter, naked-er wickeder version.

_Shinigami. _Only not Japanese.

_Giltine. _Only pretty and cute instead.

_Thanatos_. But female. And African American… or biracial maybe… And without the wings.

Focus_…_

"So Professor…" he began again. "What now?"

"Bonnie –"

"Are we still calling her that?" Klaus chuckled. "Seems as though she's a bit _beyond_ that now. Maybe it's just me, but _Bonnie Bennett, 17 year old cheerleader_ hardly seems to describe her now that she's slaughtered, oh… let's say everybody in Mystic Falls besides us?"

"She's still Bonnie."

_Serious?_

Klaus swallowed and finished off his cup of blood wishing it was something alcoholic. "That thing out there is the exact _opposite_ of Bonnie Bennett."

"I can get her back to normal," he mumbled.

"SAY WHAT!?" Damon shouted from the other end of the church and immediately they were all gathered around him and the gypsy like the holy triumvirate. Damon had Gypsy up by the collar in a millisecond. "Professor…" he growled.

Calm as a stoned junkie, the gypsy replied, "I turned her on."

"What?" Elena.

"I switched her on. She's under hypnosis."

Jaws dropped. Eyebrows raised. Gasps. Deep Breaths. Stuttering.

Klaus observed.

The first person to recover was Stefan. "You hypnotized her into killing out the population of Mystic Falls?" shock and awe in his voice.

Damon raked his hands through his glossed up hair. "This is insane."

"Actually, it's not," Atticus continued. Then because, his life wasn't in enough danger apparently, he had the gall to look annoyed. "This is the plan. This was always _the_ _plan_." To Damon, "I _told _youabout this. To get the cure we need Bonnie to be at her maximal potential. We need her to be the most powerful witch that she can become."

"We signed up to get the cure!" Stefan got in the gypsy's face. "We did **not**sign up for genocide!"

The gypsy scoffed, "Slaughtering the population of one sleepy-town rat-infested, vampire-infested, hybrid-infested hole in the world hardly counts as genocide."

_True._

"And up until now, I've handled all the dirty work getting Bonnie to sacrifice all those people–"

Damon, "Bonnie didn't kill anybody!"

"Well, I organised it all in her name, so same diff," the gypsy shrugged. "I've done all I can do, sacrifice-wise. It's up to Bonnie now to harness her full potential."

"You mean mindlessly kill everyone in sight?" Stefan. Always on that high horse, Stefan. Hypocritical son of a bitch.

The gypsy shrugged. "Tomato, tomato," he responded, cleverly pronouncing the word the same way twice.

Klaus smiled. He liked that.

"So she just keeps on with this rampage until…" Elena prompted.

"Until I stop her."

Klaus had to admit, the guy had gumption.

_Too much gumption, _for a human surrounded by vampires.

And just like that, Klaus decided that he had had enough. There was only so much entertainment to be had from sitting in the back seat and watching it all unfold. Albeit it was all unfolding splendidly, blood and chaos in the air. General mayhem. He was always a fan… But there was always a time when a proper licensed driver was required to take the wheel. And he was the only one licensed to operate this level of heavy machinery. Fuck Stefan. Fuck Damon. Fuck Elena. Fuck Dead Sherriff. Fuck Jeremy the Hunter. And fuck the gypsy/moor.

Klaus grabbed Shane by the collar.

_Compulsion Time. _

"Tell me, love, who are you and what's your game? Huh. Why don't you give me the low-down?"

A moment passed.

The stare-down intensified.

_Odd. _

Everything about him was odd. This strange little gypsy man... His skin felt wrong. He smelt wrong. Everything about him was wrong…

Klaus looked a little deeper, squinting those baby blues.

_And what do we have here?_

"_Silas?"_

The gypsy creature laughed. "You got me." He shrugged effortlessly out of Klaus' grip.

Confused, Damon Stefan and Elena, "What's going on?"

_Question of the day, that._

He wasn't afraid. Not of whatever this Silas was. He was just a warlock at the end of the day. An interesting, shady, sneaky, blood-mongering warlock. Dark magic? Ha. Klaus laughs in the face of black magic.

_Ha, ha, ha._

Except it was magic that had made him what he was today. It was magic that had brought his witch/bitch of a mother back from the dead to destroy him. It had been magic that had desiccated him not so very long ago… Magic that made the white oak dagger. Magic that created Alaric the Super-Vampire/Vampire Hunter. Magic that had nearly killed him and all his siblings… Nothing really to laugh about when you think about it, but fuck it, _Ha, ha, hearty fucking ha. _

He was Klaus. Whatever the fuck Shane/Silas was, he was still and forever will be Klaus.

Klaus the fucking baddest of all bad guys. There was never and never will be a big bad as big as him. He could be an angel when he wanted to be, but down to his core, he was pure demon. He could dance with the best of them. Do the fucking tango blindfolded if he had to.

In half a millisecond if so long, he ripped the gypsy's right arm off. Just from under the elbow leaving raw bleeding flesh exposed under the torn sleeve of farmy flannel shirt. "I will make you suffer–"

"Please," the gypsy scoffed, staring at his arm in open wonder. "You think I'd engage in a plan as epic as this, Klaus Mikaelson, without insulating myself from any and all danger?"

Stefan, "What's going on here?"

Klaus flashed his old pal a smile. "It's alright, sweetheart. Don't wet your panties, us immortals are having a bit of a convo, if you don't mind."

"Immortals?"

Klaus shot him a glare. _Shut_ _it. _

"Immortals?" the gypsy thing asked, switching effortlessly to the Hebrew language, accent and all. "You dare to class yourself with me?"

_Okay… Hebrew…_

"I'm over a thousand years old," Klaus replied. His Hebrew was a little bit rusty, but say what? "I'm as immortal as they come."

The thing with one arm smirked, "And I've seen six millennia pass. I'm as far above you as you are above them."

"Except I'm the most powerful being on the planet."

"For now."

"Enlighten me, then. One Machiavellian villain to another."

The gypsy smiled. "It all begins very long ago. Before the birth of Christ..." his gazed lingered on the crucifix for a moment. A long moment… Then he smiled again. "Once upon a time, in the old days of Egypt, there was a little boy named Silas, and he was a warlock. The first warlock. The first being who had power over nature. Me. I had no teachers. No cookie-baking grandmother. No loving mother. Just an orphan slave boy in Egypt. My mother had been a slave. My grandmother had been a slave. To put it simply… I come from a long line of whipped, shit-fed slaves. And I was a slave. A little boy slave with power over the wind and the sand and the rivers and the birds and the fish and the crocodiles and… well, you get the idea.

"I didn't know what to do with this power though. I couldn't control it. Except to make the flowers bloom. To make the harvest healthy. I was the good luck charm. _Go get Silas, he'll interpret your dreams for you. _That sorta thing. How do you think it works out? Well, I'll tell you how it works out. Little eight year old pretty boy Silas winds up getting raped up the ass by one of the pharaoh's people. And I didn't like it. So I killed the fucker, cut his heart out with a knife and ate it, 'cause I was hungry… as slaves are wont to be. And because human flesh actually tastes good, I indulged myself in what was up for offer. I think I ate at least half of the royal family before they had the priests entomb me.

"Buried me alive… Yup, sucked to be me. But on the bright side, solitary confinement without food or light or air, really _does _make you stronger. What doesn't kill you? Yeah. So it didn't kill me, and I spent the next six, seven years slowly losing my mind…

"And then… And then this freaky woman digs me up and releases me on the contingency that I heal her son who was dying from some plague or the other, and I was like, _fuck that. _So I killed her and went on to devour her entire village. By the time I was done with them, I wasn't even human anymore. I had claws, I had fangs. Elf ears. All kinds of crazy shit. And the power? I was like the phoenix version of Jean Grey plus Voldemort plus Imhotep plus Superman plus Achilles plus Avatar Aang plus Bruce Willis… It was just like _ugh, How powerful am I?_ _A god am I._ And I'm around fourteen years old by the way.

"Moving from village to village, growing in power, and bored out of my fucking mind, I start experimenting. I made the first vampires. Yeah, in your face, you're not an Original. There are others older than you. Stronger than you and your pathetic family. I made werewolves. All sorts of creatures. I made them all. I am the father of all things that go bump in the night. And still, I was just a little bit lonely. All I could make were monsters. Blood-drinkers. Flesh-eaters. I wanted to create something a little purer. A brother. Kin. And that took me some time. A couple centuries of trial and error. Until I realised that I wouldn't be able to do it on my own. I'd need somebody to do it for me. So began the hunt for someone else like me. Someone powerful. Someone who could control nature and bend it to its will.

"Needless to say, there was no one quite like me. But there was one woman who came close. Deep in the bowels of Africa, Makasha. When you're talking about the Wild Ones, you have to talk about Makasha. Girl was _crayzay_. So I decided to teach her. Just because I had naturally discovered my talent, didn't mean the same talent couldn't exist in others, maybe just in a dormant way, waiting for someone to release it. And Makasha had the talent, deep inside of her. So I trained her. Opened her mind to the supernatural. Opened her mind to her own power. And we were friends.

"We did everything together. Kill, slaughter, feed, fuck each other's brains out… and then dun, dun, dun. Bitch gets pregnant, as bitches are wont to do. _My _plan was to sacrifice the foetus and then eat it… And that didn't sit too well with her, because she wanted to, I don't know, have a nuclear family, or something. I wasn't into that shit. So behind my back, using the shit I'd thought her, she came up with a spell to bind me. Not only bind me. But split my power in half. The good and the evil. The white magic and the black magic. She sucked it all out of me, all my fucking power. She took the evil into herself and put the pure magic into our unborn child. Me, now powerless, she trapped in a tomb. Again. Note, this is the second time I'm being buried alive.

"And centuries passed, as they do. Ever so slowly. Centuries became a millennium. Then two. Then three. Then, voila, I was free again. By accident this time around. They were doing some excavation work and just stumbled across my sarcophagus. Good luck, at last.

"But everything is different. The world isn't what I left behind. Everything's changed. Makasha is long dead, so is our child. So guess for I have to do? Yeah, I have to go hunt down my descendants because guess to fuck what, they still have my powers and I'm powerless as jack shit. Immortality is nigh pointless without power.

"I tracked down the descendants of my son, don't ask how, to Greece. I find him, my great, great, great, tra la la, great grandson and I proceed to take my power back from him–"

"How?" Klaus interrupted, as much as he enjoyed a good monologue, he just had to ask.

"Hypnotism, my dear boy, hypnotism. You really underestimate the power of the mind. The poor lad was some kind of temple priest. Didn't even know about the power he had. I simply jacked into his mind, and took it. It belonged to me. The power is mine, it _wants _to return to me.

"So, anyhow, here I was with half of my powers back. The lame half of my powers back. Making the grass grow, keeping the cows fat, keeping off the locusts, saving drowning sailors, that kinda shit… And I actually did that for a while. I went to India and became a pundit. I went to a lot of countries, selling myself as a holy man, spreading rainbows and sunshine and all that good stuff… That's what I am now, a travelling do-gooder…" Shane sighed. "But I miss my other half."

"So I possessed this sad dude, Atticus Shane, the anthropologist who came to learn at my feet and I sent him out to find my better half. What I had _not_ expected was for Makasha to make up all this "Servants of Nature" bullshit. She wrapped my power up under so much rules and regulations. So much seals and locks, that being a witch nowadays involves lighting candles, and floating feathers. Once again, I'm fucked up the ass. What do I do now? Wallow in it? No, I'm not that type of guy. Me and Mr Atticus Shane – me really, because this body is just a mindless, good-looking drone – sit down and figured out a way to reactivate my true power. My full power. I call it _"expression". _You know, after the song, "E_xpress Yourself"_ N.W.A. 1988? Get it?"

Klaus' stomach was beginning to turn. The sick, twisted smile on the Shane's face… Liz's body continuing to trickle out on the floor. Stefan, Elena and Damon, spectating like little vampire children. _His_ vampire children. The human boy who used to love Bonnie… Poor, dead, pretty, blonde Caroline, disembowelled and eviscerated by her best friend. Poor Tyler, disloyal fuck as he was, didn't deserve that mind-numbingly slow torturous death. _Eaten alive? _Not a way for anyone to go.

And worst of all, Bonnie. This Bonnie Bennett. The witch bitch who had tried to kill him on several occaisons all for the sake of her precious friends. This poor, little girl that he had used and abused. That they'd all used and abused… They'd let her fall into the hands of this sick twisted _thing _and they'd not batted an eyelid because they were too focused on getting what they wanted. A cure for the precious vampire princess Elena.

What made the bile rise up in his throat, was that he could completely relate to this sick, twisted monster man. He had had his own fun brainwashing and manipulating poor, neglected witches. His last victim, Greta… Oh, the fun he'd had with her… They made excellent toys, witches…

Even Bonnie. He'd always enjoyed making her suffer a little. Her tears always had a way of making him feel… _better_ somehow. He'd threaten her, threaten the people she loved, force her to do his bidding… and feel… proud about it. As if he were training a new puppy. Grooming a mastiff. Making her his personal bitch. That sense of owning…

"You could have chosen any other witch…" Klaus barely managed to whisper.

"Yeah, but the blood is strongest in the Bennett line. She even looks like Makasha." A beat. "She even fucks like Makasha. Makasha was twelve years old the first time I fucked her, and she wasn't even a virgin. How does a girl like Bonnie make it to seventeen without somebody sticking a cock in that? Really? You? Stefan? Damon? Jeremy? Nobody hit that?"

"You raped her?"

"Ooh, ugly word that. Let's just say that while she was under my hypnotism for countless hours on end, I might have _suggested _that she fuck me as if her life depended on it." Shane smiled. "As if you've never compelled some woman to service you."

He'd never in his life done that. He'd never had to. He'd never even considered it. When you're immortal, sex… becomes ritualistic. Without procreation, sex always just seemed… bland. Pointless. Insignificant.

"I mean," Shane continued. "It's a little bit weird, fucking somebody while you're in somebody's else body, but Bonnie's… Bonnie's a good fuck. You should try it. Grade A Cunt. Certified fresh." A beat. "Exquisite. Especially when you really have her blitzed out of her mind. She's a little nympho under all the cheerleader pom poms."

Klaus' forehead furrowed. "So, your witch is _expressing _herself… She's killed a couple thousand people over this past week. What now? What's the next step from here?"

"Oh, she's not done!" Shane smiled, bubbling over with glee. She's nowhere _near_ the monster she needs to be. I've just got her started. But baby's all grown up now. She doesn't need me holding her hand showing her the way. She knows what she has to do, now. She wants to wake up that power more than _me _at this point. It's in her. It's engrained so deep in her, all I had to do was dig, until I found it. Until I found that bloodlust. She was a monster since she was born. I just took her out of the closet. _This _is Bonnie Bennett. My little malyshka." And again, that smile. That toothy, content, cat-got-the-canary smile. As if he'd won. As if he was the champion of the world. "When she's ready, she'll come to me. We're like magnets. She's literally my soulmate. I own her. I own everything about her. I–"

Klaus grabbed a handful of black curls and just ripped. He'd had enough of the gypsy anthropologist puppet. He'd had enough of the demented preacher Silas, the Great and the Powerful.

_Enough_.

* * *

"You guys might want to stay here…"

Stefan stepped in front of the door, blocking his exit. "What's going on?"

_What's going on? _Blue eyes met green. Silence. There were no words. Nothing to say.

The game was afoot.

And they were losing.

Compelling them all quickly, "Stay inside the church. Don't leave until I tell you to. And get out of my way."

He stepped out.

Into the open.

His boots squelshed down into a carpet of blood and gore. Dead animals. Eviscerated carcasses. Men women and children. Bodies that she'd halfway eaten and flung over the picket fence.

Gore.

Chaos.

Evil.

Big block of hail. Shrubs on fire… Ash and snow in the air. And beautiful, cloudless blue sky.

He took a cautious step forward, then another.

She was standing right there, one millimetre from the entrance. Hovering. Like a vulture. Like the Grim Reaper… Except naked. And beautiful.

Her hair had gone stark white now. And it was longer. Rapunzel-length. And tossing this way and that above her hair in a non-existent wind.

Her eyes were larger. Greener, no trace of that muddy brown anymore. Sharper. Brighter.

Fangs. Bloody lips, bloody chin, blood down her front. Blood all over her breast, clotting in her pubic hair, trickling down the inside of her thighs. He could smell her arousal in the air, hot and heavy…

Claws… No more pretty fingernails.

And the ears.

Cute.

Like elf ears.

Flicking this way and that, catching every sound on the wind.

_Poor girl…_ Poor sad girl. They'd all turned a blind eye, and look at what they'd done to her.

"Send out the human," she spoke. In Gaelic.

"Jeremy?" Klaus took another step forward, closer to the monster. "What do you want with Jeremy?"

She giggled, blood erupting from her throat, trickling down her chin. _Evil_. _Tortured_. _Beautiful_. "I want to eat his guts…" she laughed.

"Now that's a bit extreme love, don't you think?"

She shook her head, big doe eyes reminding him that she was a child. Just a little girl. Only seventeen years on the face of the earth. Abandoned by mother, father, friends… A little girl with no one to care about her… Little Red Riding Hood without a Woodsman…

"He hurt me."

"He kissed a ghost. That's a killing offence, nowadays?"

She shrugged. Blood dripping off of her. "Maybe." This time in French. Archaic French.

"Look at me," he responded, closing the distance between them. She smelt like blood and sex. He could feel it, as he drew closer, the non-existent wind that was blowing her hair up. Power. Pure power. The concrete under her feet was charred and cracked. The asphalt the entire street up was steaming.

A bird. A brown dove flew out of tree and he watched it. Her eyes followed his. Then she smiled, as the bird passed overhead.

Then the bird exploded into blood, guts and feathers.

She smiled wider. All fangs. Elf ears slicked back in joy. "Look at me," she repeated. This time in old rustic German.

He looked at her. Blue eyes meeting green again. This time monster. Meeting monster.

She could kill him.

The little five foot two, hundred and ten pound beautiful naked monster. Just as easily as she had killed the bird. He knew it. She knew it.

"What are you doing, Bonnie?" he asked. English.

She looked at him confused.

"You know who I am?"

"Elijah?"

"Klaus."

"Klaus…" She pronounced the word slowly.

"Klaus," he repeated with her, taking the moment to slip into her mind… "_Peace."_

She cleared her throat and hawked up a mouthful of bloody sputum. Laughter. Old English now, "Peace? I hate the word, as I hate hell–"

Using every ounce of power within him, Klaus tried again to reach her. The Bonnie Bennett from last week had to be somewhere inside the monster. Every monster has that weakness. You never completely lose that part of you that used to be human. And he would know. How many countless years had he wasted trying to eradicate that vulnerability? Or pretending that it didn't exist?

"_Pax!" _Latin, for the part of her that would understand it.

She took a step back away from him, confusion all over her face. Fear…

He crossed the threshold. Officially putting himself in her power. In her domain. Her power blistering his skin. She could kill him just as easily as the bird… He grabbed hold of her face in his hands. Calloused hands on soft, young skin. Monster meeting monster…

Her marvellous green eyes widened. Panic. Anxiety…

Fear.

He could recognise fear. This was Bonnie's fear. The old Bonnie's fear of him. The fear he'd instilled in her. Eyes dilated and large. Elf ears slicked back against her head, this time in fear. Like a startled fawn…

Her mouth opened in a silent scream.

_The scream of a dove…_

* * *

_**AN: And that's it for chapter 1.**_

_**Yeah, I'm making up my own Silas and everything. Taking massive liberties with the storyline.**_

_**Review, please. Even if it's one word. Even it's to say that you don't like it. Plot contributions. Opinions. Confusing? Too rambling? Don't like the Klaus characterisation? I really don't have a handle on Klaus' personality, that's what makes Klonnie so hard for me, I think. It's like which Klaus do I use, the one from s2, s3, or s4 or s4 midseason finale? **_

_**Leave it as another attempted/failed klonnie one-shot? All feedback is appreciated. Please, I really want to know if anybody wants me to continue this. If I get at least one review liking it and wanting a chapter 2, I'll do it. Promise. Cross my heart… Mightn't be next week, but I'll do it.**_

_**And Happy Christmas, BTW.**_


	2. Motives

**AN: Just because I got such wonderful reviews on the first chap, my heart was moved and I decided, Why use my remaining three days to catch up on studying, when I could write chapter 2 instead? **

**Special love going out to Florence930, Reighn Venhem 33704, petrovascurls, beautifulcurare,** **7jazmine7, GraceKellyBardot, Ash101, Stacie, two Guests who know themselves, and also Molly Jae, Angel of Serenity 88, and Natalie H. **

**I want this to be more plot, less romantic, less dark humour… Or more comedy? I want to try to merge everything into something sick and fun. Something dare I say, **_**wickedly**__**demented?**_

**(I just saw Killer Joe – the most brilliant movie ever, dark as eff, funny as hell. Friedkin is a living genius! Watch it and love it! (if you're over 18))**

**Lol, I finally took the time to write something in my profile. Just random rambling really… I promise from now on to always leave a review for anything I read, even if I don't like it, because views without reviews are my new pet peeve. 300 views and 10 reviews? I mean, I get it, the time it takes just doesn't seem necessary in this day and age where we don't even spare time to eject our flash-drives safely, but reviews are like mother's milk to a new-born. Let me suckle, dammit. lol. jk. (Review please, thanking you kindly in advance) No seriously, I'm basically **_**begging**_** here. I wake up every morning and check my inbox for reviews. They're like little packets of electronic joy. Seriously. REVIEW, even if you don't like it. Once you read it through to the end, please, the least you could do is a review. It's like giving a tip to the waiter, or flushing the toilet after you use it – You don't have to, but you should.**

**PS. If you're not at least over 16, you probably shouldn't be reading this, I don't want to corrupt any young impressionable minds.**

* * *

_Rome_.

1850, 1851, 1852… Somewhere thereabouts, he had had the privilege and the honour of meeting William-Adolphe Bouguereau, who at that time was 25, 26, 27 or somewhere thereabout. William-Adolphe, a young man, born to olive and wine merchants… not remarkably handsome, dirty blonde and very _French._

He'd come to the Villa Medici to spend a year learning from the masters of renaissance art, learning classical literature… learning _life, _he used to say. The boy had won a scholarship of sorts, The Prix de Rome, with a piece of art titled _Zenobia Found by Shepherds on the Banks of the Araxes. _

There was nothing too amazing about it. It was simple, not particularly beautiful, not particularly stimulating, not particularly anything… but it had fascinated Klaus the moment he'd set eyes on it. Lust. It was a lust, frozen in a moment. Human lust. Animal lust. Hunger. Deprivation. Wildness. Chaos. Savagery. Thirst. Starvation. Curiosity. Pity. Cruelty. Love…

Some random merchant boy had captured humanity and put it on a canvas for the world to see what it looked like.

For Klaus to see what it looked like.

Because it had always confused him… Maybe not at the beginning when he'd been young and alive himself, but with the passage of time and the erosion of his own humanity, he had begun to forget. It was all unfamiliar. Emotions. Concerns. Thoughts. Ambitions. Strange humans and their strange sentiments and strange belief in …

And even then when he'd been young and alive, he'd not been entirely human. He'd been a wolf. A monster, wrapped up in living skin and living flesh.

Humanity was always something abstract… something vague. Foreign.

The only thing he was familiar with was death. Death and fear.

Until William-Adolphe, or Addy, as Klaus used to call him, had reminded him.

From there, he'd took Addy under his metaphorical wing. And they'd learnt from one another. Addy learnt all there was to learn about technique and canvas and colours and lighting… and Klaus learnt everything else. Like Addy's penchant for recreating women.

According to Addy, the entire world was ugliness, except for woman. A woman's smile. A woman's supple neck. The red bow of a woman's lips. Nothing more promising of life than the fullness of a woman's breast. A pink nipple. A triangle of soft curling hair at the juncture of a woman's thighs. More lovely than a woman's laugh, her tears. Her sorrow.

"Pain is beautiful."

The pain, love and death of a woman.

Klaus couldn't help but remember Addy as he stepped into Bonnie's mind.

Oh, it was beautiful. And painful, and hungry, and lusty and brimming over with life and death at the same time.

Stepping into a mind is like a stepping into a box of chocolate… or stepping into a giant chocolate fountain. You never quite know what flavour of chocolate to expect. Banana flavoured? Coconut? Ginger? With wasabi and black sesame seeds? Rich and dark, infused with lavender and cardamom? What about a little sweet indian curry powder? With a little crushed black pepper and goat cheese? A little smoky bacon aftertaste? Kaffir lime leaves… So many different flavours… lemongrass, vodka, raspberry, Ceylon cinnamon, chai essence, goji beans, pink Himalayan salt, Alderwood smoked salt, cayenne pepper… Really, you never know what you're gonna get.

Stephan's mind was all dungeons, S and M style. Whips, chains, a rack… a goddamn throwback to the Spanish inquisition.

Caroline's was prom dresses and glass slippers, with confetti falling from the skies, seas of puppies and kittens and trees made out of cotton candy.

Tyler – empty. As was to be expected.

Bonnie? The old Bonnie's mind, he imagined would have been like the National Library. Bland, constitutional, clouded over with guilt and suppressed emotion.

Monster Bonnie?

He'd gone in expecting a maelstrom of chaos and darkness…

But instead, he'd found himself on a hill.

On a hillside… under a bright blue cloudless sky. At the top of the hill were three crosses. A little baby cross with what looked like a five old version of Bonnie nailed to it; another cross in the middle with what looked like a preteen Bonnie, just the beginning of her breast buds; and a third one, with the version of Bonnie he was familiar with. Petite. Pretty… They were all the three of them dead and rotting, crows with ravenous eyes picking at their flesh…

At the feet of the crosses was another Bonnie on a picnic blanket, sprawled out as naked as Bathsheba, as regal as Sheba, on a pile of blood stained, used-to-be-white pillows. The new Bonnie. Latest in the line. The mutant with the elf ears and the claws and the white Rapunzel hair. This version had a tail too. A short, impish, succubus-_y_ tail. And two small demonic horns. And a red, angry, blood-covered pitchfork.

And she was watching, with steadfast attention, a television screen.

A large 52 inch TV… plugged in to a large glowing stone.

And there was a sword in the stone, very Excalibur-esque. The Hunter's Sword.

_Huh. _

Klaus took a step to join her on the blanket–

In the blink of an eye, she was on her feet with the pitchfork at his throat. That was when he noticed the dragon on her shoulder. A little baby dragon. It couldn't be anything other than a dragon. Not that he'd ever seen a dragon, not that dragons existed, but only because… Red and black scales, talons, wings, breathing fire…

"No admittance, except on party business."

Klaus smiled, "Tell me love, what other business is there?"

She squinted her large green eyes at him… then tossed the pitchfork aside. As if he were nothing but a fly on the wall, she returned to her prostrate, sprawled out arrangement on the carpet. Back to the television.

If Addy could see her._ It. _Not a girl. Not a woman. A monster. A young, beautiful monster. Darker than the women they'd had in Rome. More exotic. Dark nipples this time. Dark hair between her legs. And thinner. Small. Crushable. Inhuman.

So much _more_ than human. _More_ pain. _More_ life. _More_.

"You've had time to see the movies, have you?" he asked, when he finished burning the image of her into his brain. "The Hobbit? I thought it was bloated and the visuals were extravagant."

"Peter Jackson is God," she replied not looking away from the massive television screen that she was way to close too.

"Well, let's just agree to disagree then, shall we?"

"Your opinion is of no consequence." Flat. Monotone. No inflection, no emotion, no concern. "You are of no consequence." A pause. Then she turned towards him, eyes bland. "Get ye gone."

The dragon perched on her shoulder hissed at him.

Klaus chuckled. "Who are you supposed to be, Daenerys Targaryen? Mother of dragons?" Gesturing at the massive screen, "You watch too much TV, love. It'll rot your mind."

She ignored him.

He took the liberty of sitting down. A foot or so away from her, settling himself comfortably in the bloody pillows. Goose feather pillows, if he wasn't mistaken.

_What is she watching…_

Days of Our Lives, it seemed.

Or Days of _Her_ Life…

Stuck on a loop was… Damon and Stefan… in a car, discussing something… no volume, but her red lips moved in sync with the conversation... then Damon flips a coin… and again...

Klaus let it go on for a while, just watching her, how absorbed she was with it all. The concentration on her face. The hurt. _Pain, _in all its purity.

And again he couldn't help but think of Addy. Addy would have done a thousand and one portraits of this beautiful monster. There was so much exquisite detail… So much to capture… _Could oil do her justice? Or something sharper, like tempera? Or encausta? _

The shape of her… So powerfully hypnotic.

_I'll paint her._

If he lived out the day, that was. If she didn't make him explode into a splatter of blood and guts and feathers like the little brown dove, or fur in his case… If she decided to show mercy… If she wasn't too offended at him hijacking his way into her brain… If there was a God, and if that God didn't hate him… then he'd paint her. Every curve. Every line. Every tone. Capture it all, the beauty, the pain, the bloodlust.

She didn't _seem_ too put off by him. How had she put it? Insignificant? Inconsequential? Something to that effect.

He'd never been ignored before…

It had a funny feel to it. Like existing but _not… _He was _Klaus. _Slayer of Mikael (father/stepfather). Slayer of Esther (mother). Slayer of a good bit of other people from kings to kindergartners. He was Klaus the Brutal. The Head Monster in Charge. King of Beasts. King of the Jungle. King of the Cities. King of the Suburbs. King of the fucking sub-Saharan wasteland. _King_.

And all the world was his kingdom.

And all those within it, his subjects.

_How dare she call him insignificant? Inconsequential? Whatever…_

Hurt his feelings, that did. Like the hybrids breaking their sire bond all over again. People just _refusimg_ to know their place…

_Or maybe, just maybe, I'm the one who's out of place?_

Could it _really_ be possible? That he, Klaus, was being replaced at the top of the food chain? By the witch-bitch he could have killed a hundred times over? Little Bonnie Bennett, the welcome mat that the entirety of Mystic Falls had wiped their feet on? Spat on? Shat on? Figuratively speaking… He could only hope that no one had actually spat/shat on her… but he couldn't put it pass them.

Klaus took in the home movie for a couple more minutes, just letting the silence grow… He was nothing to her. Just an ant on a blade of grass, or a faraway mosquito. And even a mosquito she might have paid more attention too… maybe…

Stefan and Damon Salvatore.

Flipping a coin to see who get to kill the witch.

They'd stopped short of actually killing Bonnie, choosing to do away with her mother instead. Damon, always a thinker on his feet… Made the girl's mother a vampire. _I killed her, but guess what, she's back! As an undead bloodsucker! And she runs off again. She's just a tree in the wind… but Elena's alive, so who cares? And whoops, Elena dies anyway like two days later._

"They hurt you, love?" he asked. Nevermind that he'd done his fear share of hurting her too. He's a fucking _master_ at creating psychological scars. Little crevices that provide footholds when you need them. Like when you're at the very edge of the precipice, so close a breeze could blow you over.

She turned to face him. Elf ears perked up. Like a rabbit's. Her tail swished… "They hurt you, love?" Completely mimicking his voice, his accent, every inflection…

"Are you mocking me?" Outrageously immature. Something he'd expect from Rebekah.

And yes, she was playing the monkey with him. "Are you mocking me?"

"I worship at the feet of Klaus Almighty." _Say that._

Ha. She smiled, flicked her ears, swished her tail again. _Just like a puppy…_ _Pitbull puppy… _Squinting her green eyes at him, "You're not Shane."

She was only now seeing that? "Well, he was being a bit of a twat… so I killed him."

"You killed him?"

Klaus nodded looking off. Everything was all so picturesque… Minus the Bonnie's nailed up to the crosses and the crow picking at five year old Bonnie's eye… Besides that… everything was picture perfect. Glorious weather. Green spring grass. A baby dragon flying about… A pretty naked girl with a tail… All very fantastical. Dreamlike.

He hadn't had a dream since Tuesday 2nd February, 1503. Had had his head split in two with a cleaver by a Vietnamese woman who'd been possessed by a ghost. Long, irrelevant story anyway you look at it, but the bottom line was, he'd never had a dream since that incident with the cleaver.

He could barely remember what they were like…

Bonnie nodded. "He was a vessel…"

"For Silas."

"Silas," she echoed, eyes glazed over, "I belong to Silas."

_Like fuck you do. _

_Oh Silas, you magnificent bastard…_

While the cat was away – (drawing pictures of Caroline, stalking Caroline, figuring out Caroline's dress size, dancing with Caroline at balls, attending/throwing balls, painting snowflakes, re-bonding with Stefan, hanging out with Damon, catching Hunters and torturing them, going to Italy, buying a villa in Italy, collecting rent, buying genuine Italian clothing, taking in a Milan fashion show, taking in a Juventus match, digging up The Sword, detouring to the Australian Outback just because, going on a mini walkabout for three days in the Australian Outback just because), killing out all his hybrids (disloyal fucks), killing the (insufferable and utterly inefficient) mayor, repainting his house, stocking the basement up with a bunch of 20-25 year old females, hiring a landscape artist – the rat had come out to play.

A big fucking rat.

A six thousand year old rat.

_Mr_ Rat.

_There`s a rat in me kitchen what am I gonna do? _

What does the cat do?

Does the cat run away? Tail between its legs? The rat _is _older, _stronger…_ But a cat, being a cat, _must _hunt the rat… _Mustn't it? Mustn't I? _

Could a rat kill a cat?

Could that happen, if say, the rat was six thousand years old and could mindfuck a meek and mild, do-gooder cheerleader into becoming hell on heels, (or barefoot, no matter)?

Mr Rat, the Monster-Maker. The Monster-Shaper. King of Monsters?

_Yeah, fuck that._

What was it his mother used to say? _Go hard or go home._

Well not actually, during her lifetime, his mother had never made much of an effort to bestow him with precious pearls of wisdom. She'd devoted her days to her witchcraft, and any free time she had was booked as "Finn Time". Then "Rebekah Time". Then "Elijah Time." And after that was "Herb Gathering Time." "Grimoire Dusting Time." "Cave Cleaning Time." "Rabbit Stewing Time." "Turning a Blind Eye to Blatant Child Abuse Time."

But still, what did it hurt to imagine that she had? Did it hurt to imagine that he'd grown up in a prairie in a little house? With fresh baked cookies and a dog named Beethoven, perhaps?

Funny enough he'd never had a dog.

Or any kind of pet for that matter…

Not even a goldfish. Or a parrot, even.

Unless you wanted to count the hybrids… and he didn't want to count them, (disloyal fucks as they were).

Greta, maybe…

_Focus._

"Sweetheart," Klaus started, pulling out the old charm. The old razzle dazzle. It had never let him down. He could mindfuck with the best of them, take that to the _bank_. He stretched out his hand skyward and beckoned the little dragon down. Sure enough it came, and perched on his hands. Sharp fucking talons, easily ignored. It rustled its wings, staring at him… Bonnie was staring at him too. Interest in her green eyes now. Interest and something else… "Sweetheart," he began again, "If anything, I'd say you belong to me. Early bird catches the worm? First come, first serve?"

And she was unreadable again. Blank. Then–

"You want me to service you?" she grinned, baring fangs.

_Not exactly…_

"You own me?" she continued. "Or do I own you… Me being the stronger of the two. The more powerful…"

"Rest easy, love, I'm all for negotiations. You own me, I own you… we'll hammer something out. And then _we _get the upperhand on Silas."

"Silas is our Father."

"Maybe, but children kill their parents every day. That's how they grow! There's a certain emancipation that comes with killing your father. A certain… evolution. Like a cocoon erupting… into something the world can't even imagine."

Her tail swished again, pensive, "Klaus…"

"Yes, my lovely."

"You're a kinslayer."

_If you want to be old fashioned about it… _"It's the way of the gods. And I can teach you… I can make a goddess out of you. Aphrodite." Or rather, Menhit_… She who massacres…_

"Why shouldn't I kill you? You've hurt me too. Forced me to do what you wanted. Threatened my life on multiple occasions… and your latest sin against me, trespassing." A single, seductive eyebrow raised. "Why shouldn't I devour you? Prove to the world that without a shadow of a doubt that _I _am the bitch in charge."

Klaus leant back on his elbows, casual as ever, taking in the blue sky. Trying to determine the exact shade of blue. He'd never seen a blue so… so…

_Focus._

"Because love," he replied as listlessly as he possibly could, "While you may be the newest, latest monster on the market, you're a seventeen year old kid without a passport, an embarrassingly small car, and 3 minutes of talk time left on your Galaxy s_2_."

"And?"

"I know how to read a map. I've got people skills."

"So do I."

_What? People skills? You really think so?_

"Trust me, love. I've got no ulterior motive. Silas wants your power for himself. I, on the other hand, just want to see you be the best little she-devil you can be."

She twirled the pitchfork with her tail. "The hypnotism's broken now, what makes you think I'm not going to become one of the good guys again and use all my newfound power to destroy you when you least expect it?"

_Valid point. But highly, highly, super highly unlikely._

"Are you going to?"

"Would I tell you if I were?"

"Would you talk about it? Or just do it?" He smirked. "If you were going to kill me, you would have killed me as soon as I stepped out of the church. Right now my hands are on your face. I'm inches away from you, breathing in your air… and you're as wet for it as a nymphomaniac whore elf." He closed the distance between them, till his lips were grazing her ear. "You're more curious about me than I am about you. Because kill all the Mystic Falls vagabonds as you like, _express yourself_ as much as you like, but you're still _Bonnie_ Bennett, the first person to recognise what I am… and you... want... to... see... more."

"You're a monster."

"You're the kettle or the pot, here?"

She twiddled the pitchfork and stepped away from him. Dainty steps backwards, watching him. "You hurt me, Klaus."

"It's how I make a living, sweetheart. I'm not going to apologize."

She nodded, "I'm not asking you to. Only… It's only fair that I get to hurt you back. If we're to be… allies."

"Do as your heart desires. Hurt me."

"Not physically," she smirked, "I want to make your heart hurt."

_My heart?_

_That still exists?_

"Go for it, love, if you feel you must."

There was a nasty glint in her eye. Maliciousness meeting mischievousness. "Who do you love? Most," she asked teasingly. "I want to kill that person."

_Love?_

There was a time when he used to know what that meant_, _when Taita had been alive. When he had been alive.

_Love?_

"I've a slight affection for Stefan, you can kill him if you like."

"And what about Damon?"

Klaus shrugged, "If you must. I daresay I'll be stuck in sackcloth and ash for a while, weeping my eyes out with sorrow, but I'll recover."

_Love? _Rebekah, maybe. Rebekah, if anyone. And Kol, perhaps… A stab of cold, dark fear went through him. He _did _have something to lose after all. Rebekah might be a royal pain and Kol might be a twat resurrected, but he'd miss them if bonnie made them explode into blood and guts, never to be daggered/undaggered again.

"Fine. You'll give me the Salvatores. As a sacrifice."

"I've no issue with that."

"And the Gilberts, the vampire and the Hunter. Pairs of cunts."

"Again, not a problem love." He reached out and traced a finger over her face. From her forehead to her cheek, over her lip… just to be sure that he wasn't speaking with a figment of his imagination. That he wasn't in fact dreaming… She let him touch her. Totally unaffected. _An ant crawling over her, perhaps…_

She sighed. "I've run out of people to kill in Mystic Falls. I need to go somewhere with a massive population. A city." Pause.

"I'm your genie in a bottle. All you have to do is rub me the right way, and poof."

Deadpan, "That sounds like me giving you a hand job and you coming on my hands."

_If your mind's in the gutter, I guess._

Bonnie Bennett. He'd never taken her as the type to give handjobs. He'd always pegged her as a prude.

Virgin for life.

_Life, until Professor Silas, at least._

She raised the pitchfork again, pointing it at his chest. "And just so we're clear about this. I'm not afraid of you."

"I know."

"I used to be, but I'm not anymore."

_Yeah, you keep telling yourself that. I'm the one in your mind. Holding your imaginary dragon… I've broken you down so often I can do it with my eyes closed. _I_ own you. Not Silas. Me. Klaus._ I _own you._

"I'm not afraid of you," she reiterated for good measure.

_One more time, but make me believe you._ "Good."

"If at any point you try to stop me, I'll kill you without the slightest hesitation."

"Stop you, love? Why would I possibly want to stop you? I like a good sheep slaughter as much as anyone. Done a few rampages myself, back in the day. A little pillaging here, village burning there..."

"So we're agreed then?"

"We are agreed."

"To fuck with Father Silas, then? You'll help me kill him?"

_Father Silas… aka the Rat. _"Yes. I love that. Fuck Father Silas. We kill his six thousand year old decrepit ass. And rule the world."

_Gary Barlow… Does that count as love?_

Focus.

"The Salvatores. The Gilberts. And Matt. I think I forgot about Matt…" she looked away confused, eyes squinting as if she were trying to remember if she had indeed killed the poor bartender boy.

_I am the cat. _

_I have the canary (dragon)._

"No worries, sweetheart. We'll rounds them all up, nice and tidy, quick and easy, then we're off. Chicago. New York. Detroit?"

"I'll pick the place." She smiled. A bright smile, and the sun seemed a little brighter for it, the grass a little greener. Her eyes actually seemed to twinkle, if eyes could actually do that. He'd seen a shitload of eyes in his millennia on earth, but nothing quite like what he was seeing now… "We can be heroes," she sang. In key. Beautiful and soft. Hypnotic. "Forever and ever. I, I will be king. And you, you will be queen–"

"I don't mind wearing the skirt in the relationship."

"Good," she nodded. Then frowned, "Now get the fuck outta my mind."

* * *

"Okay…" Damon watched from behind the shutters of the church window. "Guys… We have a problem."

Everyone gathered around him, peeping out at the two figures. Bonnie, or what used to be Bonnie, and Klaus.

"He got through to her?" Stefan mouthed.

"Well, they're both super-villains now, aren't they? They speak the same dialect of evil. Like two little lovebirds, whispering…" Damon squinted, "And unless my ears deceive me, Klaus is actually _volunteering_ his services. He's offering to tutor her into becoming a _real_ mass murderer. Because, let's admit, this Mystic Falls Massacre was not all that well done, as far as massacres go… It took her how many days? He's offering free lessons on how to be an even _more_ efficient_, utterly _despicable Lady Hitler."

"You can't be serious," Elena breathed. "Bonnie's not a villain. Bonnie's not evil! She was under the control of that… that professor or whoever he was. She's going to come back to normal. She'll learn to control her power. I learnt to fight the urge to kill. Caroline learnt it. Even you, Stefan, and you too Damon. And Bonnie's got a better heart than all of us, if anyone can come back from a nightmare like this, it's Bonnie," she reached for the door handle.

Damon's hand clamped tight over hers, wrenching it painfully off the door. "Don't you even think about it!"

"She's my sister!"

"I know you love her. We all love her! She was a great ol' gal, but that _thing _out there is _not_ the Bonnie Bennett you grew up with drinking lemonade on hot summer days. That _thing_ out there is not your friend. It's not even _human_."

Elena reached for the door again. "She put her life on the line for all of us! More than once! She died! To try to bring me back to life! Can you imagine the kind of person who does that? The courage? The purity of her heart? Bonnie's a one in a billion kinda friend. I don't expect you to care Damon, but you can't stop me–"

"He's right," Stefan jumped in, wrenching her hand off the door knob the same way his brother had done. "I get that you're sired to him. I get that you don't really care what I think anymore… But I'm _not_ letting you go out that door."

"Neither am I," Jeremy added his voice to the argument.

Elena's eyes filled with tears as she took in her brother's own wet face. He had loved her too. "We can't abandon her, Jeremy! She wouldn't abandon us! Remember when you lost _your_ mind? You were going to kill me! And _she _stopped you!"

"Elena…"

"Don't you dare, Jeremy!" Elena screamed. "The sacrifices she made for you!"

"I know," Jeremy wiped his eyes, sobering himself up, "I know. But Damon's right. That thing out there is not Bonnie. It's not human. It's evil."

"No!" Elena let her body fall loose into Stefan's arms… "No. We can't. I won't let you." Ugly, pitiful tears trailed down her face. "No…"

Jeremy flexed his muscles, tensing up. Stefan gave him a sad not. "We have to kill it."

* * *

"_We have to kill it,"_ Bonnie mocked in a high pitched voice as she and Klaus strolled down the street away from the church, she a little way ahead of him.

"What's that?"

"The cunts," Bonnie hissed, looking back. Green eyes gone turbulent. "They're talking about killing me… Damon's coming up with a plan." She turned and started walking backwards. Making finger quotes in the air, "_A plan! _Do they not understand the meaning of immortal? Do they not _see _what I am capable of?_" _she scoffed. "Damon's coming up with a plan!"

Klaus stretched, "Spectacular. I can't wait." _Could they not wait until he got her out of earshot to start hatching a murder plan? _"Damon's plans are always epic. He's pure genius, that one."

Bonnie snorted and whirled back around, leading the way back to his house. Where hopefully his little baby sister and little baby brother (relatively speaking) were _not_ located at this moment in time...

If he did indeed have a heart, that was still indeed capable of any sort of emotion, let alone love, then by rights, that love should go towards people who were actually related to him, shouldn't it? Who could blame him for that?

_Good luck to you and yours, Stefan, but my hands are tied. Not literally, but still, tied._

_Absolutely nothing at all I can do for you…_

_Win some, lose some…_

_Maybe if you hadn't teamed up with your friends to desiccate me that time, but whatever… _

_Nothing personal._

_No hard feelings. No resentment…_

_There's just absolutely _nothing_ I can do with respect to saving your life. _

Oil, he decided suddenly, as he watched the asphalt sizzling away under Bonnie's feet. As he watched her ears twitch this way and that... As he tried to imagine the feel of that white, ethereal hair in his hands... As he took in the splendid shape of her legs and ass... Oil paintings made the best portraits.

He'd only need to invent a new shade of blue to get the sky right…

_**AN: And that's all she wrote, folks. Seriously. This is my last Friday of freedom. I have to respond to the call of duty come Monday, but I just couldn't leave my ten loving peeps who reviewed hanging, so I had to put a little closure to chapter 1. This is like chapter 1 part 2, instead of an actual chapter 2. From the next chapter, the plot will go into gear, and the pace will pick up a bit. I want to make this klonnie into a real dynamic kinda relationship, not something twilighty. Even though I've been reading some twilighty fics lately and loving them…**_

**Didn't read this over so sorry for any errors, and if it seems like a rush job, it kinda is. I just wanted a chapter 2 out really badly. Fanfic-writing fever. Worse than dengue. The only thing to cure it is writing, and more cowbell.**

**Next update will be sometime in January (**_**hopefully**_**).**

**Trying to make Klaus into a kinda "sexy grandfather" persona, anybody feeling that? Yay or nay?  
**

**And again, for the love of everything pure and good in the world, REVIEW. (not compulsory for people who wrote already for chapter 1. Or added me to your follow/favourite list. I love you guys forever). Everybody else, all the "viewers", PLEASE, I'm down on my **_**knees**_** here. EVEN IF YOU DON'T LIKE IT!**


	3. Afterbirth

**AN: A brief, little Silas chapter. Starts off way, way in the past then comes up to present day. We're back to Klaus and Bonnie in the chapter after this. Maybe. You know I got to give my baddies a little screen time. Enjoy.**

**Shout out of pure love to all the peeps who reviewed chapter 2: loveit, ****ohnodfw, GraceKellyBardot, Stacie, TalulaJones****, ****Florence930****, ****petrovascurls****, ****Brightside64****, ****LeilaniStar****, ****beautifulcurare****, ****dux999****, and four lovely guests.**

**I have a little rant to go on but I'll do it after the story.**

**Warning – it's a kinda _'_**_**eww/ **__**gross/ eh? / wtf?'**_** chapter. It'll be a little confusing, but don't worry about it too much. You could probably wait for the chapters to pile up and then give it one big read. **

**I kinda creeped myself out doing the backwork for this. Gave myself some nightmares, lol. It won't be **_**too **_**vital to the plot. Basic character development that had to be done. (I'm going ham on this story ****)**

**And before anybody takes offence, lemme just put this out there that I know near to nothing about Africa or actual African culture or African tribes. This is all fantasy, Wikipedia or National Geographic. If I write something about Africa, I'm just winging it same way as I'd wing it about Russia or China or anyplace I've never been. Please, nobody be offended. It's just that Africa has this rich supernatural culture, and 98% of the witches on TVD are Afro-american so I thought, why not?**

* * *

**The First Birthing**

* * *

_Nine months came… and passed_.

The child did not come.

_Ten months passed... _

The child did not come.

_One year passed..._

The child would not come.

They had cast her out into the night when her belly continued to swell and swell. The child was surely dead within her, this they all knew, but her belly continued to swell. So they cast her out into the darkness, without cloth, without bread and without hope. But she survived.

With nothing to call her own, except the entity within her womb, she survived in the dark. The unfathomable anguish of the nights, the despair by day… Disease, cold, hunger, fever, thirst, infection, pain, torture… She survived. When her hair fell out... When her eyes turned yellow and when her teeth came lose in her gums... When her skin became indurated with pustules, warts and ulcerations… When the entirety of the world seemed miserable desolation, she remembered the child within her and she survived. She had her baby inside her. Inside her. Safe from all dangers. Safe from hunger. Safe from winter's biting cold. Safe from the master's whip... She was the Mother.

She survived in the wilderness, living like a beast, feeding on field mice and worms, on swamp water and bat faeces, the spleen of dead animals and fat lizards that were too old to leave their holes... Driven through the bleak and the dark she went on, a shadow with no conscious thought save that she was the Mother and that she must survive.

When three years had passed, the baby inside her had become too heavy to bear and her spine cracked under the weight of it all. But still she lived. Her body, paralyzed, useless, an eyesore, _persisted_.

She was the Mother.

Surely, she was no longer a living woman, but now a wraith. An omen, they called her. A warning of pestilence and plague to come. The old ones of the village spat curses at her, and the brave young ventured closer to torment her with pebbles and pails of cold water. _Surely, no good will come from her presence. Surely, she had made herself a devil's whore. Surely, their village would be doomed unless they killed her to remove the taint. _

They decided to hang her.

After they whipped the demons out, they would hang her.

They cut the tongue from her month first, lest she summon her demons forth... Then they began the whipping.

For nine days and ten nights, they whipped her. Until her back was raw and bloody... Until she drifted beyond thought, beyond pain, beyond space and out of time. They whipped her until they decided that they had better things to do with their days than spectate the suffering of a random, strange, addled, demon-possessed woman.

Until she became a bore, and for the sad man delegated the task of carrying out the whippings – a tedious, monotonous, pointlessly dull chore.

Ready at last to be done with the Mother on the tenth day, they hung her from a tree. A big sturdy plum tree... with ripe juicy purple plums dangling low. She hung by the neck until she was dead. Then the crows fancied they'd rather pick at her already rotting flesh than task themselves to look for something fresher. The Mother was now nothing more than a feast for the crows... And an impending feast for the worms who'd have their way with her when the crows were done.

So there she was, swinging in the gentle wind from an in season plum tree, being devoured by maggots, carrion birds and carrion beetles, minding her own affairs like any proper corpse... when, at long last, the sun went down into the west and the child was born.

He fell out of her dead womb to the hard gravel below. The crows squawked and flew away. The wind stilled. The dogs sniffed and howled, but kept their distance...

_Survive, my little one…_

The child's new, bright blue eyes gazed up at the dead, rotting Mother. He was willing her back to life... Apologizing for what he had done to her, for the years she had suffered, for the years she had been made to carry him... Thanking her for being his shield and sword, his guardian, his home, his mouth, his ears, his eyes...

He would miss her, he realized.

The days would be colder. Harder.

Already the sharp stones were cutting into his soft, new feet…

When he was finished with his wordless prayer of thanksgiving and repentance to the Mother, _his mother_, he gathered the cord that still tethered them together in his hand and he tugged.

He caught the placenta when it fell, warm and soft. There would be no Mother's Milk for him, but he would get enough from this last parting gift. He was no suckling babe, anyway. He had teeth. Little baby teeth, but he could bite and chew. And the placenta was soft anyways, aside from the membranes which were tough and fibrous...

Soundlessly, the child walked off into the night... And Darkness swallowed him.

* * *

**The Forty-First Birthing**

* * *

She did not see the snake as it came out of the river. There was no moon. No stars. And her pain was too much.

A pity, because such a snake had never been witnessed by human eyes before. It was a large reticulated python. White with black cross-working, 20 feet long...

She screamed into the darkness, cursing her faith, cursing her father, her mother, all her ancestors, herself. The pain was too much. It felt as though her back was breaking, as if her belly was stretching and bursting. There was something within her that could not get out. Something begging for release. A dam, waiting to explode.

"Damballah!" she screamed out into the night begging the skyfather to relieve her suffering. For him to take away her pain. To carry her off to the other side where she would no longer suffer.

No man had ever lain with her, and yet her belly had grown as if she was with child. The people had made signs of protection when she passed near. They wore blue feathers in their hair. They surrounded their homes with salt and fresh urine to burn the evil spirits away. And when her screaming had become too much, they told her father to kill her.

Her father would not kill her with his own hand, though.

So he brought her to the river for the crocodiles.

And the crocodiles came…

And the crocodiles went…

And night had fallen…

Darkness swallowed her.

There was no moon. No stars. And her pain was too much.

She did not see the snake as it came out of the river.

She did not see the man as he came out of the snake.

She saw nothing, knew nothing, felt nothing but her pain…

Until the man, the god, the skyfather, lit a fire.

_Damballah_…

Damballah had come. He sat cross-legged staring into the fire… as snakes crawled out of him. Small snakes. Out of his ears, his nostrils, his mouth… Small white snakes, small black snakes, his body hummed and hissed.

He was nothing like how she had imagined him. Not large. Not monstrous... He looked almost like a man. Except for his rabbit red eyes.

And his sharp pointed ears.

_Damballah._

She had called and he had come. Damballah would end her suffering.

* * *

_Heads are going to fucking roll, _Silas resolved as we wiped snake goo from his eyes.

Someone had fucked up on an epic scale.

Africa?

Really?

Heads were going to roll.

He was going to get on a plane and he was going to Mystic Falls and then heads were going to fucking roll. Starting with that toxic mega-cunt Niklaus, and then-

"Damballah," a hoarse voice whispered.

"Eh?"

He turned away from the brightness of the fire. Eyes adjusting... Pupils dilating... Functional retina developing...

_And what do we have here…_

Africa. The only continent in the world where you could still get fed to the crocodiles.

On a bad day? Lions.

Fucking Africa…

He'd missed it, truth be told.

Her name was… _Asha? _

Odd name for a girl. But she was odd all over.

Been a long time since he'd seen one of her kind. Pygmy tribe.

Bayaka, to be precise…

_Lol…_

When last had he come across one of the Bayaka? Dark skin, flawless mahogany… Full, taut breasts... And electric blue eyes. So vibrant… So blue… When last had he seen eyes like that?

She had called him out of the wind. She had called his spirit out of the water. She had called his flesh out of the earth. _O__h, the wonder that you are._

"Asha?"

She gargled something in her pygmy tongue.

"English, please."

"Please…" a tear trickled out from the corner of her eye as she turned her head slowly towards him.

"Please, what? What do you want?" A snake slithered out of his nostril, semi-stifling him for a moment. He could feel them coiling around tumultuously in his stomach. There was a big, thick one sleeping in his intestines. A couple swimming around in his bladder and one wedged in his fucking urethra... He could feel their eggs in the alveoli of his lungs. Eggs in his liver… eggs in his spleen… in his kidneys… "You called me. I came. What do you want?"

The snakes were all over her.

She wasn't afraid though. Not even the slightest trace of fear. Classic Bayaka.

Her fingers curled weakly, and her hand crept between her legs. "It hurts."

Silas nodded.

_Fuck yeah, it hurts._ He could feel every ounce of her pain, and it was disorienting. "You want to be free of the pain?"

"Yes."

"You want to live?"

"Yes."

_And sign on the dotted line, forget the fine print... Your soul is mine. _He sent one of his snakes up her thighs and inside of her, ripping through the rigid flesh and opening the passageway.

And then the blood began to flow.

Thick, dark blood. Hot, warm blood, just gushing out of her…

_Waste not… Want not…_

He beckoned her lazily. "Come here," he ordered.

Slowly she stood, shaky and weak. He could smell her fear now. The air was renk with it.

The blood was what had done her in.

Not being abandoned. Not the crocodiles. Not the darkness. Not the magicman sitting by his magic fire that had come out of a snake and not the snakes that were now coming out of the magicman, but her own blood.

He smiled at that. He liked a little fear in his women.

A little fear could go a long, long way.

_Menarche_. Some scary shit anyway you look at it. The most traumatizing experience for any girl breaking into puberty… And if the ever-happy Americans hadn't found a way to make it less horrendous, some pygmy girl in the bowels of Africa without access to Seventh Heaven reruns didn't stand a chance. Worse yet, some pygmy girl with an imperforate hymen.

Not too many missionary obstetricians volunteering their services to jungle pygmies who may or may not practice cannibalism.

She would have scared the fuck out of her family. And the whole village, no doubt, in order for them to leave her to the mercy of the river. A girl, coming of age and not passing her monthly blood? Demon possession, _duh_. The blood accumulating within her, month after month, dilating her abdomen – demon baby, _duh_.

African Jungle-People Logic. Impeccably sound.

How old could she be, he wondered. Girls with her problem were usually 13, 14… but she was older than that. 17? Maybe…

The fire and shadows danced on her skin beautifully as she came to stand before him. Positively trembling.

Intoxicating, heady perfect, wonderful fear… He could lose himself in it. In her wide eyes. In her tears…

"Closer," he summoned her.

_Cute, _how afraid she was. Of him. Of the blood. How ashamed she was of her own body, her nakedness…

_When you smile at the ground, it ain't hard to tell, you don't know, oh, oh, you don't know you're beautiful…_

She took a small step toward him.

"Why are you so afraid? You called me."

"Who are you?"

"Damballah." Well, he was. _Wasn't he? _Or he used to be. So many names, hard to keep track of them all. "I am Damballah. Why are you so afraid, child? You called to me. You spoke my name, and I heard you. Why do you fear?"

"The blood?" her hand came away from between her legs to show him her dark, wet fingers. "I am dying?"

He leant forward unconsciously, drawn in by the fragrance. His appetite was awakening… "Do you want to die?" he spoke, but he couldn't hear himself. All he could hear was her heart. All he could see was the blood running down her legs… All he wanted was her blood.

He reached out and took her hand. The way she trembled at his touch… made him shudder. Slowly he pulled her to him…

"I don't want to die."

"Good." He closed his mouth around two of her fingers, sucking them clean. "You taste…"

"You want my blood?"

He nodded, weak. Near paralyzed with need. "Mother…" He pulled her in closer to him.

_You have my eyes…_

_Mother…_

He gripped her by the knees and stared up at her… "Bonnie?"

"My name is Asha. I-"_  
_

"Feed me!" He pulled one of her legs out from under her and tossed it over his shoulder and sealed his mouth to her opening. Not mother's milk, but it'll do.

* * *

**AN1: I'm going to rant a little bit. I just have to get this off my chest. I was going to take the high road, really, I was... I was going to just ignore it and move on, but I couldn't. So here's the deets:**

**I, C+B, was recently accused by two quantum assholes (henceforth referred to as QA1 and QA2) of committing the vile act of ripping somebody else's work. First of all, I was in shock. Pure shock. Then utterly disgusted with myself. Then utterly disgusted with all people ever. Then finally, just utterly disgusted with QA1 and QA2. I wasn't going to make a scene. I was going to play it cool, because after all, I was the one begging people to review, right? I kinda asked for it. **

**But I decided, **_**fuck it, go have a rant,**_** so I'm going to have a little rant here. Please ignore, I just have to get this off my chest, because this kinda shit is personal. I'm going to break it down like a PBL question just so everybody understands where I'm coming from. Cool?**

**So… **

**First off, QA1 reviewed chapter 1 and posted:**

"This is interesting but seems like a rip off of E. A. Brown's BLEED... You completely took the Klaus character from her story. So sad when authors cannot be original. I was excited at first till I read more of this chapter."

**Okay**. **So my reaction to this: "**This is interesting but seems like a rip off of E. A. Brown BLEED..." ** Huh. QA1 says it **_**seems **_**like a rip off. Just his opinion which he's entitled too, which I can appreciate. At this point, I was like, **_**the fuck? C**_**ould this be true? **

**Now, just to make this clear, EA Brown and I are absolutely cool. E. A. Brown had PMed me and asked me to read BLEED about 2-3 weeks back because she wanted my honest opinion on what I thought of her story, and she and I actually discussed our preferences of the Klaus character, and I was wholly and completely constructive and supportive. **

**So I, having made five failed attempts at a klonnie fic already (see Sample), and after reading all the lovely klonnie fics out there like Follow Me, and Bewitched, and after pow-wowing with E. A. Brown, I decided, what the fuck, try this klonnie thing again and really put my back into it, because a) I wanted to write another tvd fic, and b) I couldn't muscle up another fresh version of Damon that I felt comfortable with.**

**So thus it was that Monster Mash Up was born. Inspired by BLEED, Bewitched and Follow Me and a couple fics by irishcookie and about a dozen more klonnie fics. Maybe I should have put that in the author's note in chapter 1. Maybe I need an acknowledgements page. Or an appendix so I can site my references Vancouver style…**

**Next step, duh, I have to read ****over ****BLEED because the two things I take pride in above all else? Character Development and Originality. I can read and appreciate anybody's fic, but that's what I hold myself to. So when you accuse me of ripping a character, it's like a dagger to the heart – no pun. It really fucking hurts. Like gravel on your eyeball. **

**But **_**after **_**I reread BLEED, I'm thinking to myself, **_**the fuck? **_

"You completely took the Klaus character from her story." **I can't rip Klaus! He's a fucking canon character. He's in the fucking books. How can I rip him? How does one come to a fanfiction website and accuse them of ripping a character that is not an OC? How does that work? That's when I decided that this person had to be a quantum asshole.**

"So sad when authors cannot be original." ** Please. Me, not original? After the fucking hours I spend brainstorming this shit, get real. I invest **_**way **_**too much time in writing for some random anonymous QA to take cheap shots at me like this. **

"I was excited at first till I read more of this chapter." **Well, fuck you, homie. Who cares about your interest? If I had 0 positive reviews, and this was all, then I'd do a triple take and check myself, but otherwise? Yeah, fuck off.**

**And I was content with myself… Until the next day when boom, QA2, aka Lily, shows up with this:**

"This is a response to the guest who suggested this is a rip off. I totally agree but not just the character of Klaus but E.A. Brown's actual story. She made Klaus more of a vampire just like EA Brown, she killed someone in a gruesome fashion in the first chapter just like EA Brown, even the the mention of daggers and family in the first paragraph just like EA Brown. The characters their thoughts, Klaus killing everyone... It is in fact reminiscent of BLEED! I'm going to let the author know about this! As for you Cinders and Brimstone, YOU SHOULD BE ASHAMED! You copied even the way she named one word chapters. I hope she doesn't know about this. It's shameful when someone must steal concepts from another person. Have a little class, really!**"**

**Seriously. Eager me checks my inbox every morning for a little bundle of joy and finds this. Seriously. Dudes, Seriously. And **_**this **_**is what totally makes me flip my shit. Hands up if you see how that can totally make somebody flip their shit. Not one, but two QAs felt the need to write this up on my lovely little review page. And they didn't even sign in, so that we could have a civilised, private convo about it. They be calling me out and shit all public and anonymous and shit.**

"This is a response to the guest who suggested this is a rip off." **Two QAs bonding here…**

"I totally agree but not just the character of Klaus but E.A. Brown's actual story." **Cheap shot number 2. I, in one chapter, not only stole Klaus (who they think is an OC apparently) but also totally ripped the entire story that is BLEED.**

"She made Klaus more of a vampire just like EA Brown." ** I don't speak asshole so if anyone can translate to me what QA2 meant by this, I'd be much obliged. Was Klaus not a vampire for the mass majority of his life? Does he not still continue to act like a vampire, more so than he acts as a werewolf? Or a hybrid, given that the TVD writers haven't really defined hybrid beyond "werewolf + vampire= ridiculously killable hybrid." How did I make Klaus **_**more **_**of a vampire? More than what, in the show? In the book? Does Klaus not drink blood? Does he not have fangs? Anybody who speaks asshole, please clarify. Seriously, this is confusing.**

"she killed someone in a gruesome fashion in the first chapter just like EA Brown", **I'm sorry, **

**a) Your definition of gruesome and mine are worlds apart. Grow some chest hair then come back and talk about gruesome. This is filed under horror. Gruesome is what I'm going for and I ain't nearly started getting gruesome. (Unless other non-asshole people have a problem with it, then I'll tone it down)**

_**b) The **__**fuck**_**? Killing a character in the first chapter is forbidden now? EA Brown and EA Brown alone must be the sole person allowed to kill a character in the first chapter?**

**c) My chapter one is like 6,000 words long. People have complete fics shorter than that. Am I not allowed a ratio of 6000 words to 1 death? **

"even the the mention of daggers and family in the first paragraph just like EA Brown" **So I write a fic where Klaus is the main character and _not_ mention the daggers and his family? Really? Because I'm not allowed to because EA Brown also mentioned that he daggered his family (which is canon)? **

"The characters" **So it's escalated. Not just Klaus, **_**ALL**_** the characters now. I'm ripping each and every one of EA's characters.**

"their thoughts" **Note:**** I always include the thoughts of the POV. In every fic, even outside of TVD. Even outside of fanfiction. I always flesh out the protagonist. This is nothing that I ripped. How the fuck can I rip thoughts? **

"Klaus killing everyone" **Klaus killed 1 person! One (1)! Uno!**

"It is in fact reminiscent of BLEED!" **exclaimed the quantum asshole.**

"I'm going to let the author know about this!" **exclaimed the quantum asshole. **

**a) At this point I was utterly shocked. You meant to say, QA1 and QA2 **_**didn't**_** write BLEED (at this point I'm questioning their literacy overall, but anyhow…)? They have absolutely nothing to do with BLEED or EA Brown? And still, all this attacking of moi? Does it need to be said that if EA Brown had a problem with my fic ripping hers so totally, that maybe, I don't know, EA Brown herself would have said something or possibly PMed me? Granted she may not have read this yet, she may not be a fanfic junkie like I am, but that said, isn't it EA's decision to make a scene about it or no, and call me out for ripping her. Imagine that you really were EA, and you deliberately went about asking somebody to read your fic and then two weeks later they write a fic that's an exact clone. That's something that should utterly piss her off, right? **

**b) Even if I **_**was **_**ripping a character/all her characters/her entire story. So to fuck what? Yeah it'd be bad, and immoral and unethical, but really? This is . Read one Bamon and you kinda read them all. Read one Klonnie and you kinda read them all. Read one Steroline, you kinda read them all. The possible stories you can come up with are limited unless you go totally AU and nobody goes totally AU. I **_**hate**_** predictability and even I don't go totally AU when writing a fanfic because there are certain expectations that you have to meet. Nobody's going to write about a Bonnie who has superpowers from some experiment gone wrong… cause that's just not a tvd story that people want to read.**

**c) Sometimes I come across a fic that's a little too similar to another, do I go on a finger waving expedition? *shaking my head* no. There are times when sometimes people take long to update on a fic I'm following and I don't even take the time to back-read because it's like, **_**yeah, I know the story. **_**People reimagine something I've done in Polyester, think I goes about policing them? Really? To me, this site is supposed to be a 'live and let live' kinda arena where everybody just gives it their best shot.  
**

**d) And how fucking dare you? I tried so fucking hard to get a version of Klaus that was different from the other Klauses, (my own included because ripping Polyester is my nightmare), and to get a fresh Bonnie that was different and still not 100% OOC. I actually read fics – even the shitty ones, no offense to anybody, but being real, there be some fics out there that make you be like "whoa, English must not be your first or second language" – just to get an idea of what's been done and what not to do, so that I could give people something to read that's at least 75% fresh and authentic. How fucking dare you try to threaten me like if I'm some fucking 5 year old in kindergarten? You gonna tell on me? Report me? Really?**

"As for you Cinders and Brimstone, YOU SHOULD BE ASHAMED!" **People have been killed for less offensive declarations. Crying shame on me? Shame on you, shame on your mother, shame on your father, shame on the midwife.**

"You copied even the way she named one word chapters." **Do I even have to defend this? At this point? Really? EA has dibs on one word chapter names? Because I've not done it before? No one's ever done it before? I deliberately write a note saying that I want to tweak my style to make this story different to Polyester where I used to spend considerable amounts of time coming up with chapter names that I'm sure nobody actually cared about and you accuse me of this? Seriously, anybody even spent two seconds thinking about the significance of the chapter named "Katamari Damon"? Anybody? I spent half a day coming up with that. How many words then, might I ask? How many is appropriate? I tend to either go with a phrase or a word, but please, let me know what the regulations say. What I'm allowed.**

"I hope she doesn't know about this" **Whyever not? I think if somebody's ripping all her characters and her entire story, she should most def know about it.**

"It's shameful when someone must steal concepts from another person. Have a little class, really!" **Granted, I'm on a rant. A rather classless rant, too, but it had to be done. I feel bad about it, not as bad as if it were true because concept-stealing is indeed deplorable, but accusing someone of concept-stealing, esp. here on a site that's main function is to promote creativity and community service? That just sucks balls, am I right? **

**I know this is a really long, really, pointless, expletive loaded rant, but I had to do it. It was either rant and continue the story, or not rant and say 'fuck it' to fanfiction because this was seriously bothering me. I know some viewers out there will be like "who da fuck she think she is, ranting at me?" I know a few myopic people out there will actually agree with QA1 and QA2, but you know what? I don't even care anymore. Go ahead, write what you want, review at your pleasure/displeasure. If I offended you, I'm seriously sorry, unless you're an asshole. **

**I wish I could somehow ban assholes from reading my fics. If only someone had created some kinda e-asshole detection software or something. **

**SERIOUSLY – I ain't gots no problem with criticism. I want to encourage every single person to read EA Brown's BLEED and see for yourself. If my Klaus seriously comes off as too similar to hers, if my story comes off as too similar, please let me know and I'll try to fix it. It could be just that I'm too much into my own ideas to make a fair comparison. **_**To **__**me**_**, our two Klaus versions are different. Her's is kinda crazy impulsive, and as I said, I'm trying to make my Klaus crazy as well but more like a fun-crazy/doting-Alzheimic-grandfather-chessmaster kinda way. I can be a jerkass sometimes but usually I'm not and I take people's opinions seriously. I don't even mind if you want to be an ass about it. But if you're just out to show your ass, please, PLEASE, sign in, PM me and we'll hash it out nice and civilised and privately. I love a good argument. I argue with trolls all the time, so if you're a troll and you want to slap me in the face, fine, I welcome it. We'll start Slapfest 2013, but I really, really want to keep the review wall nice and reflective of what I'm doing. If you find something's a little over the top in the gruesomeness, that's cool. If you don't like where I'm taking a character, that's cool. I can take criticism. I **_**want **_**criticism. PLEASE, criticise. It's not like I'm writing this for my own fun (I kinda am, but…) my main goal is to entertain somebody for a little 5-10 minutes. I'm doing this for my peeps who liked Polyester and wanted me to write something else. My pov is that criticism actually helps more than it hurts and if more people did it, would be a better place. Yes, I tend to be a bit my-way-or-the-highway sometimes, but I'm trying to work on that. **

**Just me, but I've started this new thing where I write a review for everything I read. A kinda do-unto-others-as-you-would-have-them-do-unto-you approach (if it's annoying anybody, just let me know and I'll stop). It's just that thanks to the traffic stats, you can actually see how much views a story gets and it's a bit disconcerting when your story has **_**thousands **_**of views and like 100 comments, because it leaves you wondering – what about everybody else? did they enjoy it? Did they hate it? One review. Just one word, even. Not getting a review is like… a nymphomaniac hooker not getting paid. Yeah? She might be promiscuous and sleep around for free anyway, but come on, ten bucks won't hurt. And reviews are free. It takes like 30 seconds to write a sentence. Not that hard.**

**So criticise away. It's not so much what you do, it's how you do it. All I'm asking is that you consider the fact that I don't speak asshole, okay? I can't decipher it. Honestly. Cross my heart. I just don't understand it. So try and not be an asshole if you're gonna write a review. Because then I have to become all sleepless and insane and ranting, and it's like, who wants to type up a rant? Who wants to **_**read**_** a rant? Nobody. It's just a waste of my time. And no, that's not an invitation to write in asshole code just to provoke me into wasting my time. I watch American Horror Story; I know how the devil works. You won't fool me that easily. This is a **_**special**_** rant dedicated to QA1 and QA2. **

**And so ends my tirade.**

* * *

**AN2: I humbly apologize for the above rant if QA1 and QA2 happen to be less than 16. Children** **are allowed to be imps every now and again. Ranting and cussing at kids ain't cool, but I'm assuming they ain't kids, cause I don't really see kids reading my rated-M fic. But if they are, Sorry for the rant, don't do drugs, stay in school… And this is assuming that they still reading this fic in the first place… which I hope they aren't.**

* * *

**AN3: To everybody else, I know that I now maybe come off as an egotistical pretentious narcissistic foul-mouthed jerkass, but I really had to get this off my chest so that I can sleep at night without thinking about it. I do take a pride in what I write and if it's not up to my standard I dump it, so when people make me question my own integrity, and do it in an asshole way to boot taking anonymous cheap shots? That just rubs me wrong. Like a wet hand up a cat's back.**

* * *

**AN4: I spent 3 hours typing up this rant. Seriously.** **3,150 words. Spent on a rant. **


	4. Epiphany

**AN: **

**First and foremost, much love going out to my peeps for their vociferous support of this fic. Thanks. And "thanks" doesn't even begin to describe my level of gratitude.**

**People I love forever:** **LeilaniStar, welp, StillStacie, Ash 101, Poetgirl10, Florence 930, Reighn Venhem 33704 (btw what's the inspiration behind this name?), petrovascurls, Sparrowheart527, GraceKellyBardot, Md, Casper, michelle3737, I2Y2012, MONA SALVATORE BELIKOVA and two lovely guests, one of whom described me as **_**one seriously deranged fucker**_**. Flattery, I love it.  
**

**This chapter is pure Klaus randomness. I know I promised plot-work since a chapter ago, but I just wanted to do a tiny bit more where it comes to setting up the foundation of the story. Getting all the characters right so you know what everybody's about, more or less. The real game starts in the next chapter. You know how I like to start off these stories vague and rambling. Consider chapters 1-4 as a four part prologue. This chap is so long… and I'm telling you from now, kinda pointless but it had to be done. Don't fear, an actual plot is coming up next.**

* * *

**Epiphany #1 – **He shouldn't have left the church.

* * *

**Epiphany #2** – Bonnie was the Devil.

* * *

**Epiphany #3** – Bonnie was going to kill every single living being in the world. Or at least America. And maybe Canada.

* * *

**Epiphanies #4, #5, and #6:**

Say push came to shove, and say the world was coming to a sudden bloody apocalyptic end, and say he had the power to save any three people…

And only _three_ people…

Who would be those lucky three?

A riddle almost.

It had been a while since he'd considered such things… Apocalypses. Ultimatums. The true face of Evil. Hell. His mother in Hell…

His ceiling needed cobwebbing. (**Epiphany #7**) A fucking nest of spiders had taken up lodging in his house. Mexican redknee tarantulas…

Three people…

And then there was this issue of love.

And this issue of death.

He understood death.

Death was the absence of life. Death was what remained when he was done feeding on his victims. Death was the feeling of finally sinking a dagger into Mikael's chest.

Death was what had become of Henrik and the other one whose name he had forgotten over the years.

He understood death in its totality.

There was this pesky thing about love though… What exactly was it? The Bennett Banshee wanted to bring death to the persons he loved most… So he supposed it wouldn't be too farfetched to assume that to love someone was to have that desire for them to _not_ _die_.

Mothers want their children to _not_ _die_.

Humans want their pets to _not_ _die_.

Stefan and Damon want Elena to _not die_.

God alone knows he'd wanted Greta to _not_ _die_. He'd wanted Maddox to _not_ _die_.

He'd wanted Henrik to _not_ _die_.

In 1984 Lou Gramm had sung that song, that notorious American ballad _'I want to know what love is.' _Klaus could empathise with the man.

What the fuck was this thing called love? And why was everyone going all loopy about it? What was so grand about love? Why must he love?

Wasn't love a mortal emotion? Wasn't he above such petty temporal sentiments?

There'd been that little experiment with Caroline… where he'd tried, really and honestly tried to figure out the entire thing about love and being in love. He'd picked her, the most classically beautiful person in the godforsaken rat-hole that was Mystic Falls, and he'd pampered her, and conversed with her, and danced with her, and bought gifts for her, and he'd not killed her regardless of the number of times when she'd gone behind his back with schemes to kill him/dessicate him/trap him in cement…

Had that been love?

Maybe not, because at the point when her pretty little head had gotten detached from her body he'd been standing right there. He'd seen it go down, and he'd not even thought of stepping in.

He hadn't so much as made a sound.

Elena and Stefan and Damon and Jeremy… they were all screaming and crying and being childish, snotty brats, but maybe that was how you were supposed to react when you see someone you love get their head ripped off. He wouldn't know.

Perhaps he was to love what the Grinch was to Christmas.

And maybe, his heart could grow three sizes (three sizes up from non-existent)… A curious notion…

Just supposing he did have a heart though, and also moreover, suppose that he knew what love was, and to compound it all, suppose that there did exist three persons in the world that he loved above all others.

Or liked above all others.

Or tolerated above all others…

Who would these three spirits be?

_A riddle within a riddle within a riddle…_

His sister, maybe?

Surely, Rebekah. Good ol' Beks. He didn't mind her existence…

If he had to love anyone, it might as well be her. **(Epiphany #4)** She could be as irritating as an ice-pick to the temples, but they'd had some fun times together. Of course, there'd been years on end where he'd wished her dead himself. He'd daggered her so many times he'd lost track… But being honest, he loved her.

In a proper, natural, big brotherly way… She and Kol might have their ambiguously incestuous thing going, but that really wasn't his business...

He'd never noticed the oddness in that relationship… Not until he'd read the Game of Thrones. They were always as thick as thieves, always sneaking about, laughing at their secret jokes, skulking in the shadows spying on one another… And she was so sinfully blonde.

And thinking about the homicidal, temperamental, shady son of a bitch, Klaus supposed that it could be said that he also loved his brother, **(Epiphany #5)** Little laddie Kol. A regular Oliver Twist on crack cocaine, on most days. A broody Edward Cullen imitation on others… Personality disorder. Bipolar disorder. Substance Abuse. Dissociation… Klaus sighed, as his brain wandered through the DSM IV picking out possible psychiatric disorders to attach to his psychotic, neurotic, eccentric baby bro.

But who was he to judge, anyway? He was no beacon of sanity himself, just look at some of his life choices... Like selling his soul to Rasputia. That had been the decision of a madman. Only a madman would have left the sanctity and safety of the church that day. Only a madman would have dared.

And Stefan had warned him. But no. He'd had to play Fearless Warrior.

Bonnie… The last person he'd come across as efficiently ruthless as Bonnie Bennett Ex-Cheerleader was Pol Pot, extremist, agrarian communist, leader of the Khmer Rouge and the Prime Minister of Cambodia back in the 70's. 1970s. The man actually had had sites called Killing Fields where his communist soldiers would gather up and kill city-born intellectuals by bashing their brains in with a hammer.

Mystic Falls had now become a Killing Field.

Fuck, the girl wasn't even using a hammer. Talk about efficient.

And third… To round it off, he loved Gary Barlow. **(Epiphany #6)**. He wasn't _in love_ with the man like some teenaged girl from Manchester – but there was something about the guy… Something so powerful and pure… If there were angels around the world, divine creatures just walking around pretending to be human? Gary Barlow would be one of them. There was an air about him, so tranquil... Like a calm sunset on a Hawaiian beach. So sinfully handsome… The beard. The eyes. And that voice. Pure utter perfection… The man was a musical genius, playing at heartstrings and piano strings with equal skill.

And he was a werewolf too. Something else they had in common besides being artists.

Gary proved that just because you were a shaggy man-dog, didn't mean you couldn't be proper and cultured.

Such a hero.

_Yeah you and me we can ride on a star  
If you stay with me girl, we can rule the world  
Yeah you and me we can light up the sky  
If you stay by my side, we can rule the world…_

If he had to be responsible for protecting three people. Without a doubt, they'd have to be Rebekah, Kol and Gary. Life wouldn't be the same without anyone of them.

Imagine a world without Gary Barlow.

A world without Take That…

He'd have to track down Gary and–

_Fuck…_

_What about Chris Martin?_

Could he extend himself to maybe love four people instead of three? Chris was no Gary, but if the world was going to hell in a hand-basket… the very least he could do was preserve the art. The very least.

_What to do?_

What was he supposed to do? For the good of England and the World by extension?

Tough decisions had to be made.

_Cobweb…_

The trouble was that Chris really wasn't an independent artist. If he saved Gary, Gary could function on his own, the rest of the band was all fluff and distraction… But Chris…

Was Chris worth anything at all outside of Coldplay?

Should he save the entire band?

He had all their CDs, so he really didn't need them. And being honest, since A Rush of Blood to the Head they hadn't been as good. Steadily declining one album after another… That abominable song with Rihanna…

Ugh.

For that song alone, they deserved whatever they had coming to them. Klaus chuckled as he imagined the Death of Coldplay. They'd be in their ridiculous elephant suits, and La Magra Reborn would pop out looking pretty like some fairy tail elf… and then she'd eat them.

_Lol_.

Rebekah, Kol and Gary. "My final three," he announced to the tarantula on the ceiling that was looking down at him with its repugnant beady eyes. "But what about Bono?"

A world without U2. Ugh.

After the Janis Joplin incident of 1970, he'd made a vow to never let good humans go to waste. If he'd had the time, he'd have built an ark. A real, functional ark. And he'd pack it full of all the musicians in the world. Elton John would get a ticket. Muse. Matchbox 20. Enya. Annie Lennox...

Taylor Swift wouldn't get a ticket, for damn fucking sure.

Alicia Keys, possibly. And Shakira.

Maybe he'd have Beyoncé and Rihanna have some kind of Diva Battle to the Death… Beyonce, Rihanna, Pink, Kesha, Christina Aguilera, and Adam Levine. And the pretty girl who co-hosted the Voice, Something Milian. They could all have huge, nice melee…

Britney Spears…

What had the world ever done to deserve Britney Spears? Though he'd admit to enjoying _Toxic _on occasion…

Yael Naim would get a ticket to ride his ark.

Phil Collins.

Sting.

_To save or not to save Bono?_

Four people?

There were two problems with that plan. A – He had no fucking idea where the man lived. There were just too many more important things that he had to keep in mind on a daily basis. And B – the man was a humanitarian. Whatever that meant. He'd be nothing but trouble, possibly the_ worst _person one could take with them to ride through an apocalypse. He and his bloody bleeding heart. Always caring about the unfortunate riff raff_. _

_So fuck Bono.  
_

He'd need somebody to entertain Rebekah. Some kind of celebrity. An actor, maybe. Or better, that Irish fellar who sang Breakeven...

_Fuck that. __We hate the Script. B__eks'll have to make do. _

_She and Kol will figure something out, I daresay._

Ugh. The fucking spider was on the move again walking across the ceiling like nobody's business.

Three people.

Rebekah, Kol, Gary…

Would he miss anyone else?

_Elijah?_

…Nah. Smug, cocky, gentleman whore.

_Stefan?_

For old time sake?

_Yeah fucking right. Each shit and die, Stef._

**(Epiphany #8)** He'd have to change Gary into a hybrid. The guy was already a werewolf. True, he'd have to use that last "emergency" vial of Elena's blood, but it'd be worth it.

Klaus smiled at the thought of a sired Gary Barlow sitting by a fireplace with a big old piano...

_Yeah you and me we can ride on a star  
If you stay with me girl, we can rule the– _

The radio exploded into a burst of fiery red sparks.

"What the fuck is wrong with you?" Bitchgirl screamed at him as she burst in to his room. No knocking. No manners whatsoever. He could have been naked, jacking himself off– she didn't know. He hadn't actually touched himself in centuries, but the fact was that he was a grown fucking man and he should at the very least be afforded the courtesy of a knock. "If I hear this song one more time, I will fucking kill you." She took her time to enunciate emphatically, "I will amputate all your limbs, dick included, rip your fucking guts out and strangle you. I will strangle you and I will not stop until you are dead. Do you understand? Play that fucking song again and I will kill you."

_Quentin Tarantino… _

"Do you understand?"

"Yes." _Yes, you fucking Hitler_.

He'd have to save Tarantino too. Make Tarantino read him bedtime stories, like that concubine woman from 1001 Arabian nights. Why couldn't he have had a father like Quentin Tarantino. Why did he have to get saddled with the passive-aggressive homicidal step-daddy? Life just wasn't fucking fair. (**Epiphany #9 ) **

_Timothy Olyphant…_

She continued,"I fucking hate that song."

_ Because you're the fucking devil incarnate. _Christ, he couldn't even think in piece.

"Before this is over I'm going to hunt down whoever sang that retarded shit and crucify them."

_I'll fucking kill you first, you fucking, evil bitch-cunt hybrid._

One week ago, when he'd made his deal with Lady Sauron, he'd thought he'd been making the smart move. He'd thought that underneath all the slaughter and disembowelling that he'd get through to the "_Real Bonnie_" and that they'd have a nice, cordial arrangement.

But no.

He supposed there was no _"Real Bonnie"_ anymore… (**Epiphany #10).** To think that the insufferable Witch-Bitch had actually had a darkside! To think that her darkside was so fucking dark!

_God_, she was relentless.

She'd eaten all his stocks. Every single thing in the house. In the first fucking day! Would it have killed her to leave a little something back for him? Really? Would she have died if she hadn't eaten every single human in his basement?

For fucks sake!

And why the fuck was she eating people in the first place? Actually _eating_ people? He could get the urge to rip into a jugular. He could understand a little bloodlust. He'd spent years and centuries ripping into jugulars and femorals until he was blood-drunk… He'd even taken a nibble or two of human flesh. Experimentally. But even in his wolf form, pigging out on humans was a clear _no_.

Duh, she wasn't human anymore, that ship had long sailed and gone down on the iceberg, but whatever beast she was becoming, she was still _humanoid_. And humanoids eating humans was just sick.

Fucking cannibalism, that was.

And it wasn't even just the humans, the bitch ate _everything_. Like some fucking evil _black hole_.

Men.

Women.

Children.

Dogs.

Cats.

The family of squirrels in the back? Yeah, she ate them.

Even the fucking mice.

The mice who'd never done a thing except clean up the crumbs in his kitchen.

_"Mockingbirds don't do one thing but make music for us to enjoy . . . but sing their hearts out for us. That's why it's a sin to kill a mockingbird." _

_And mice. _

They'd left it out in the book, but Klaus was sure that if Atticus Finch was a real man, and still alive, he'd agree that it was a sin to kill mice as well.

Fuck, if Atticus Finch was real, and alive? Bonnie'd eat him. She'd eat him _and _the mockingbird. Scout and fucking Boo Radley too.

_Christ… _Why couldn't he be a fictional character too? Some stereotypical supervillain that might not actually win against the heroes, but never got his ass totally creamed. A villain like John Travolta. In Swordfish, _not_ Battlefield Earth.

He was a prisoner in his own house.

She had inverted the laws of slavery and made him some kind of tortured European _man-g__eisha _in his own fucking house. All around him was the destruction she'd wrought.

All his clothes…

His closets and closets of clothes… His bed sheets. His curtains. His books. His art…

And now the radio.

The only thing he had left was his S3… That he'd had to hide lest it meet the same damning end as his laptop… and his 52 inch 3D TV…

Joining forces with the baby hellion and taking over the world? Yeah, that wasn't going too well. There were times when he'd catch her looking at him with that glowing glint in her eyes… Sizing him up no doubt.

Fucking harpy, she'd eat him.

Death by cannibalism.

How had it come to this?

The past week was a blur. He'd spent a week, suffering physical and emotional abuse at the hands of a seventeen year old bitch.

He should kill himself.

Except he suspected that that was what she wanted...

And he had never been big into doing what other people wanted.

He would live just to spite her.

A little piece of him was starting to believe that she was faking crazy. Because no one could be so totally bat-shit crazy in real life, and he'd come across some intensely crazy fuckers in his time.

Klaus squinted, studying the girl as she screamed at him, fangs peeking out every now and then.

The white hair suit her, oddly enough. She was wearing one of Kol's sweatshirts and one of Beks' _ridiculously short_ shorts. Blood stains all over, of course, but looking pass that it was all very… tantalizing.

_Tantalizing? _

Might not be the correct word for it. Captivating was more like it. With eyes like that, bright and wicked and laughing… Laughing and rejoicing in her victory over domesticating him, Klaus, King of Hybrids. She'd striped him, literally, and now she'd come to gloat.

She had to be faking it.

_Bitch._

"You are so retarded!" she shrieked.

"If I'm retarded," he shrieked back, louder and angrier, "then that makes you super retarded because _you're_ the one who got hypnotised from the _suspicious_ college professor who was _way_ too old for you, you fucking whore!"

"How–"

"How what? How dare I? It's some kinda secret that you're a supermassive CUNT?! Am I not supposed to say that out loud!? You FUCKING BITCH!"

"Klaus–"

"BITCH!"

"Just listen to–"

"GET TO FUCK OUT OF MY ROOM!"

She hissed, showing her fangs. Like that'd impress him. He hissed back.

"Fuck you!"

"GET OUT!"

She turned with a stamp of her heel. Slammed the door shut behind her.

Klaus sighed when he heard her footsteps thump down the hallway away from him.

He'd had enough of this insanity. Seven days. Twenty-four hours a day.

He couldn't take it anymore.

He wasn't going to survive.

He was not going to rule the world alongside Miss Cannibal. It just wouldn't work. Someday, someday rapidly approaching, his patience would snap, _he'd _snap, and then he'd _get_ snapped. She'd snap his ass in two.

It would be far wiser to say '_fuck Be__k__s, fuck Kol, fuck Gary' _and just escape.

It wasn't too late to escape.

The Bonnie-Silas Showdown – he didn't have to be a part of that. He could climb through the window, get in his car and just escape!

Go Australia maybe. The aboriginals were as good a bunch as any. Maybe, he'd even finish that walkabout.

He could live a rich fulfilling life all by himself in the Australian outback. He'd make a coffin out of whatever material he could scrounge up… find a well or a spring or some kind of water source… and yeah, just chill out.

He should go to Australia and chill out.

Let Little Miss Darkside and Silas the Love Guru solve their own affairs.

He did not need to get involved. He could just leave. Surrender his house. His property. His remaining siblings. Gary…

Would he be able to watch the X-factor if he relocated to the Australian Outback?

Would there even be an X-Factor to watch?

Darth "Bonnie" Vader, youngling slayer, devourer of hopes, dreams and human flesh would never allow X-factor to go on. She obviously had no taste for music. No taste for art. No taste for anything other than manflesh.

She'd burnt down his art studio.

She'd killed his pony. (The one he'd bought to give Caroline on Easter).

She'd killed Caroline.

Really and truly, any monster that could kill a person as pure and beautiful as Caroline- Caroline was…

_Caroline_…

Hot vomit surged up his throat and erupted down his front. His body convulsed in spasms.

_God…_

He was crying. Actually crying. With tears…

_"Are you a man? Or a mouse?"_

_God? _

His body slumped wearily against the side of his bed.

His stomach clenched again.

In his thousand plus years on planet earth, he'd changed. He'd been a Viking, a monk, a farmer, a newspaper salesman, a school-teacher, a heroin dealer, a librarian, a soldier, an artist…

And now at the end of his days, he was a loser.

A common naked loser covered in vomit.

A vagrant.

What he wouldn't give to be Lord Niklaus again.

What he wouldn't give for a pair of pants…

A decent pair of pants.

He stared at himself in the mirror. His sooty, dirty, naked pathetic self. What had she said? _"You're a tricky little bugger, Klaus. And I don't trust you. You've always got something up your sleeve. You're full of pride. And dignity. You're a big bundle of superiority. And I don't like that. You hide yourself in all these fancy trappings…fucking environmental friendly hemp jacket under your eight hundred dollar duffel coat… Two hundred dollar Sorrel boots..."_ and she'd gotten up in his face. _"You've got so many layers. Let's peel them off, see how many licks it takes to get to the centre of your tootsie pop."_

Trapped. He was trapped, like an animal in a bushfire. A naked, doomed, pathetic animal.

And the tears wouldn't stop.

He curled over onto his hands and knees, a retching and convulsing mess. Vomit on his hands. All over him…

"Fucking bitch." He keeled over onto his back like a mangy, dying dog.

He really should get his ceiling cobwebbed… (**Epiphany #7 -recurring**)

What he wouldn't give to be a spider.

Not a big fucking tarantula.

A little itsy bitsy spider that could slink away in the dark of the night, unnoticed by the monsters.

He'd used to think that he was a monster.

_"You're a fucking choir boy compared to me. A fucking choir boy."_

"Oh, you fucking bitch," he groaned. She was in his head, tormenting him. "Fucking Silas…" He couldn't stop the tears. He didn't even know why he was crying. He wasn't in any actual pain, but something inside of him hurt. He was experiencing an abstract sort of pain. Something intangible, indescribable.

Caroline?

Tyler?

Was he fucking crying over Tyler, who he'd wanted to kill his own fucking self? The image of the she-devil's teeth ripping the boy's throat apart flashed through his mind. If he lived to be ten thousand years old, he'd never forget that. The screams… His stomach clenched again. Empty. "Oh, you fucking bitches. The pair of you… I'll kill you. I'll fucking kill you…"

He would protect Rebekah and Kol, or at least die trying... Only he wondered, who was protecting _him_? **(Epiphany #11)**

Where was _his _big brother?

_"Oh sinnerman, where you gonna run to?"_ the phantom voice that had been haunting him the past couple of weeks sang in his head.

**Epiphany #12**, he missed Nina. The fun they'd had...

Another exceptional human being that he'd let fall by the wayside.

_Oh sinnerman, where you gonna run to?  
Sinnerman, where you gonna run to?  
Where you gonna run to?  
All along dem day  
Well I run to the rock, please hide me  
I run to the rock, please hide me  
I run to the rock, please hide me, lord  
All along dem day  
But the rock cried out, I can't hide you  
The rock cried out, I can't hide you  
The rock cried out, I ain't gonna hide you guy  
All along dem day  
I said, rock, what's a matter with you rock?  
Don't you see I need you, rock?  
Lord, lord, lord  
All along dem day  
So I run to the river, it was bleedin'  
I run to the sea, it was bleedin'  
I run to the sea, it was bleedin'  
All along dem day  
So I run to the river, it was boilin'  
I run to the sea, it was boilin'  
I run to the sea, it was boilin'  
Along dem day  
So I run to the lord, please hide me lord  
Don't you see me prayin'?  
Don't you see me down here prayin'?  
But the lord said, go to the devil  
The lord said, go to the devil  
He said, go to the devil  
All along dem day  
So I ran to the devil, he was waitin'  
I ran to the devil, he was waitin'  
Ran to the devil, he was waitin'  
All on that day  
I cried -  
Power!_

Power…

Decades after her death, he'd finally caught the joke. _Ha ha_.

Sinnerman vs the Devil.

Epic blockbuster staring Niklaus Mikaelson as Sinnerman and introducing Bonnie Bennett as the Devil.

"Okay…"

A moth flew into the web and stuck.

"I know what I have to do."

Long story short. He had to kill her.

Even if she promised to spare him, she wouldn't spare Rebekah or Kol, and she'd already made it known her desire to do away with Gary.

He wouldn't let that happen.

She had one weakness, (**Epiphany #13**) and he'd exploit it. He'd used the ground of bones of those priests he'd killed that time. He'd throw it at her, see what happened. Worst case scenario, it had absolutely no effect and she went on to eat him to death. Best case scenario, she melted.

_Power_. That was the name of the game.

And he'd fucking win.

* * *

Maybe, just maybe, she'd cut him some slack. It had been fun at first, but now? She could tell he was at his limit.

Bonnie rifled through the blood bags until she found what she was looking for – a bucket of cookies and cream ice-cream.

Big ol' badass Klaus it was turning out was not the ruthless savage he tried to come off as. Moving around his house, inspecting the way he lived... He was more nobleman than monster. What with the wine cellars, and the chandeliers, and the frozen mini-pizzas and frozen lasagnas.

She hadn't specifically _wanted_ to torture him. She wasn't some kind of Neo-Hitler, but she'd had to prove a point. The fucker had spent a thousand years being the number one bad guy. Of course he'd have an ego the size of Russia.

But things had changed. For good or evil, things had changed.

She wasn't Bonnie Do-Right anymore. She was Bonnie Badass, and the sooner everyone got with the programme, the better.

It's not like she'd _wanted_ to kill and eat the entire population of Mystic Falls, (plus or minus Matt), but after she'd killed Caroline, she'd thought, _what the fuck? Why not?_

_Why not?_

At long last she'd finally gotten what Damon had meant by flipping the switch. You really don't give a shit. Eating Tyler had been… really just to demonstrate her newfound power. It's not like she'd _wanted _to eat him, but after ripping his throat out, she'd had very little choice but to follow through.

In the end, she might very well spare Elena and the gang.

She was in two minds about it. On one hand, they all of them deserved to die at her hands ten times over. But on the other hand, they didn't really matter. The only person in the world that mattered was Silas.

The fucker who'd hypnotised her.

Used her.

Brainwashed her into being his obedient puppet… And she'd let herself be used just because. Just because. Shane was hot. Shane paid attention to her. Shane had a nice office with a framed picture of her grandmother on his desk.

Shane was nimble, Shane was quick. Shane made her suck on his candlestick.

She took the stairs two at a time, strolled down the corridor… paused by his door…

Was he crying?

Bonnie smiled.

He was either crying hysterically or laughing hysterically.

Mission "Break the Cutie" accomplished. She hadn't _wanted _to do it, but all the same, it had had to be done. If she, Bonnie Do-Good had been turned into a walking freak of nature, if her grams had to die for the Salvatores, if her mother had to die for Elena, if Jeremy had to cheat on her with a ghost, if the entire Martin family had to get whipped out, if Caroline had to be eviscerated, if her father had to be drowned in the kitchen sink, if she had to go to prom without a date and support the walls while everybody danced, then by golly, Klaus could suffer a little mind-rape.

A little mind-rape never hurt nobody. And he'd started it first. He'd started the mind manipulation game, not her. He'd hacked his way into her mind, and he had to learn that when you fuck with the bull you best be prepared for the fucking horns.

So yeah, she'd sent him a couple of nightmares. Kept the image of Caroline being shredded fresh in his mind. Made him remember the blood curdling screams, the smell, how red her blood was… Kept replaying Tyler's biting of the dust… Sent a couple ghosts to whisper in his ears and make his nights a little sleepless. Stripped him of his fancy brand name clothes. Burnt his stupid paintings and drawings. Ate his pony…

She really hadn't wanted to kill the pony. It was such a pretty thing, the little foal, just months old. All huddled up in a basket and blankets… Heart-warming. Made her think about Bambi and a lot of random Disney shit…

But in the end, even the pony had had to go. Again, she hadn't _wanted_ to eat the pony, but she _had_ to. It's called making a point. And the point was, _fuck with me and I'll fucking eat you._ _Literally._

And if she had to eat Bambi, if she had to eat baby squirrels, if she had to eat mice, and Mr Kubrick's newborn son and the entire Mystic Falls day-care unit… Then Klaus could suffer a little mind-rape. It beat actual rape any day of the weak. Lucky bastard had it easy.

Something about seeing him suffer filled her with joy. He'd never really done anything _too _bad in her book, but still… Watching the fear grow in him day after day… It had become her new pet project. He was crying now, but she wanted to make him scream.

It really was a lot of fun. Breaking the Cutie. Pushing them, and pushing them until they can't take it anymore and implode under the sad fucking weight of it all.

No wonder they were always doing it in movies and TV shows. Hell, he'd been doing it to her back when she had been The Cutie. Forcing her to do his bidding. Threatening Jeremy. Threatening Elena. _Using _her like a fucking five dollar whore.._._

Ironic, wasn't it, that he had pushed The Cutie so far, that now the Cutie had become the… _ how did he say? Supermassive bitch-cunt hybrid? _She laughed as she moved away from his door and head down to her own room.

She'd have to kill one of his siblings just to finish drive the nail home… Most likely Elijah. Just to make a point. Or Kol. Although taking out Rebekah might be the best option… Killing Elijah would shock him, but killing Rebekah would hurt him. Killing Kol?

Kill all fucking three of them?

Where _were _they even, the fucking _siblings_...

Siblings, who needed them?

She'd hunt them down… Kill all three of them… _Again, _not because she _wanted_ to.

Sometimes you have to do things you don't want to do when you want to make a point. Ghandi had said that you had to be the change you wanted to see in the world.

_Be the change._

If she wanted people to take her seriously, she had to take herself seriously. She had to toughen up and make the hard calls. Do the dirty work. Rip hearts and take names, as they said.

She strode into the room she'd taken over. Her impromptu workstation.

While she was busy mind-fucking the hybrid… time was wasting. And she wasn't making any progress. There were bigger issues at hand than taming Klaus. Issues like Silas. Issues like tracking the bitch down and feasting on his bone marrow.

She spun the globe around and sighed. He could be anywhere. Anywhere at all in the world. She could scry for him. It would be easy enough… but that'd be conceding. _Wouldn't it? _That would mean acknowledging him as someone worth her time. Someone she had to be aware of.

Seven days… She'd waited for him to come… and seven days had passed.

_I am the Hunter._

But was she? Was she really? She flung the bucket of ice-cream against the wall and watched it explode into a sweet sticky mess.

_Fuck_.

She wasn't the Hunter. She wasn't even close.

* * *

He was in the shower when he walked in.

She pulled back the shower curtains, made a point of staring at him, then pulled up a chair. "How ya doing, love?"

"I'm fine."

He certainly sounded better.

"Sometime later down the road, after we kill Silas, I think I'm going to fuck you."

He didn't answer.

"Did you get a chance to fuck Caroline before I killed her?" she asked, making her voice light and casual. "Because now that I think about it, you hadn't really been making much progress on that front."

He nodded, then squeezed out a handful of shampoo. "That's an accurate assumption."

"Do you miss her?"

"Not really."

"Did you love her?"

"Not really."

"Do you love anyone? Besides that arrogant frontman for Take That, I mean?" she sneered.

"Not really." He worked the shampoo into his hair lazily. "I'm a villain, remember? People like you and me, we don't love."

"Really?" she smiled. "So you don't see us falling in love and fucking like a pair of horny rabbits?"

He shrugged. "You're not exactly my type."

"Too black?"

"Too bitchy." He turned up the shower to full blast. "You're a proper demonic cunt, but you know that, don't you?"

Oo, somebody was getting his groove back. Maybe she'd have to intensify the programme. Bring up the ghost of his dead mother. Even better, his dead father... Even better-

_Later._

_Discipline._

_First things first.  
_

Bonnie shrugged and yawned. "I have a problem."

"Understatement."

"You might want to be nicer to me, you know. Not be so hell-bent on hurting my feelings. After I take out Silas I'll be the most powerful person to touchdown on this planet since–"

"Hubris."

"What?"

He gave her one of his smirks as he began to soap his arms. "When you get a chance, look it up. H-U-B-R-I-S."

"Touché. But I didn't really come here to chat or watch you lather up your balls–"

"You don't say."

"I came to offer you a truce. I'll let you wear clothes again, if you help me. Sounds fair? That's how we ended up in this situation in the first place. You promised to help me kill Silas and–"

"Fuck you."

"Hey, hey, hey… no need for the attitude. Don't get prissy with me. Anytime you want out of this deal, all you have to do is say the word." She got up from the chair and left the jeans and the hoodie on the seat. "It's not like I'm going to scoop out your eyes with an eggcup and eat your heart with a plastic spoon. Feel free to say no any time you want. Cool?"

He re-soaped his loofa. "Like a slice of frozen watermelon, darling."

* * *

Irregardless of whether she had gone insane from power, or been latently insane all along, or was faking insane, or hypnotized into being insane, the fact of the matter was that he was dealing with an insane person.

And you could fight insanity. Preferably with SSRIs and anti-psychotics, but barring the availability of that, you fought insanity with sanity.

It's a tempting notion to fight insanity with even _greater_ insanity, but that's a trap.

The _best _way to combat pure, utter madness was to put up a front of equally pure and sound **logic**.

**Epiphany #14** – He was immortal.

_After midnight morning will come..._

So what if she killed Caroline? And Tyler, and everybody else in America/the World?

Bottom line? He'd survive whatever shitstorm was on the horizon.

She wanted to break him down? Fine, if that was what she needed to established dominance as head monster in charge. So be it.

_Go ahead! I take your fucking bullets!_

This was a mental game of suicide chicken. First fucker to back down lost.

And he was immortal. The guy who is immortal always wins when you play chicken.

_I am immortal, _he chanted as she approached him in the dark. He could see her perfectly though. Every curve. The blood red tears staining her cheek. And she was naked again. It seemed that at any point in time, one of them _had_ to be naked and broken.

Couldn't they survive together? The world was big enough for two monsters.

And there would be no more need for tears.

"Klaus?"

Trembling lip. Trembling hands. She was shaking like some little naked seventeen year old girl.

** Epiphany #15** – Bonnie Bennett was beautiful even with elf ears and crazy Rapunzel hair.

"Bonnie, love?" Before he knew what he was doing he was pulling her into his arms. He wanted, irrationally, to hold her. To protect her.

**Epiphany #16** – she was warm, and soft…

And she was crying.

"Oh, come now love… what's with the waterworks?"

"He's coming back for me," she sniffed, voice breaking with tears. "Silas–"

_The fuck I care? _

She'd spent all week tormenting him and ridiculing him and now, _now, _when he'd come up with a master plan to kill her with Priest Bone powder… _Now?_

And still, he couldn't help himself, from pulling her closer. She was just so perfectly warm. So perfectly fragile. He traced his fingers through her hair pulling it back from her face. That perfect monster face.

"He can't hurt you, love."

"Promise?"

_Oh, fucking hell…_ this was some new game. Some new psychological tactic to overpower him… And he was falling for it. He was falling for it!

He framed her face in his palms. "Darling, I promise."

She pulled herself up even closer to him, burying her face in his shoulder. She smelt raw, like blood and meat. And strawberries. Spring grass and nectar. All so heady… and intoxicating. One of her petite hands slipped down between the two of them, down, down, down… settling on his cock…

If he was a lesser man… he'd be done for.

If he hadn't seen her eat a foal with her own eyes...

If he hadn't seen her eat a soft smushy human baby... and Tyler...

If she hadn't made the last seven days of his life sheer hell…

He would _not_ be seduced. He was Klaus. He was–

"Fuck me, Klaus," she moaned, grabbing a handful of his hair in one hand and yanking hard. The other hand zipping down his fly... stroking him off."Fuck me like it's my birthday."_  
_

"Is it?"

"Yes." Then the scent of her arousal hit him. Her lips crashed down on his neck, wet and hot, and then her fangs were in him.

**Epiphany #17** – the girl was an angel…

* * *

**AN: And that's it for a little while, guys. Sorry, but I seriously have to stop ditching classes. Hopefully I can get another chapter out this month and get the ball rolling on this story.**

**And I know plenty of you are kinda questioning the point of this chapter... The point is that, to me, even though they make Klaus out to be this cerebral killer in the show, he's kinda actually a softie and gets taken advantage of rather easily. He's very gullible and naive in this boyish way. He _thinks_ he a big bad, but is he really? This chapter I just wanted to show you a little sneak peak into his mind and his thought process. It's how I imagine Klaus to be, very very random. That thing with Caroline - it''s like he just woke up one morning and said," you know what, I'm going to fall in love today. With whom, i wonder. oh yes, Caroline, she's a beauty." And even in the active pursuit of Caroline he still comes off almost as this innocent, nigh virginal being despite being a thousand years old... Or is it just me who thinks that? He's so trusting. Trusting Stefan. Tyler. Caroline. He's like a big, hot teddy bear.**

**This is a fic about insane bad guys, but somebody still has to be the hero. It's either going to be Silas, Klaus or Bonnie. ****I want to present all the characters in a way that's sympathetic enough for you to root for any one of them. I want some readers to actually be on Silas's side. ****And it's a mash-up of all their little ticks and tricks and we're all just waiting to see how it comes out on the other end. (Me. _I_'m waiting to see how it comes out. I have no idea how this is going to end. Okay, I have a vague idea, but I don't even understand it as yet. I just know the _feeling_ I want to get at the end.) There all the three of them evil, with deranged patterns of thought... but who do you want to come out on top? More and more i want to show the similarities between all three of them and in doing that, indirectly highlight how vastly different they are. (They _are_ vastly different - from this point on, the divergence begins.) **

**I kinda underestimated the challenge in doing a fic with no good guys.  
**

**And Bonnie? Somebody wanted a Bonnie POV and I thought, why not slip a little bit in there. Ha, that was fun to write. Verdict? Is it just that she's flipped the switch, or is it that that's the only way for her to explain it with herself. I don't want this new Bonnie to be like a split personality, I don't want her to be straight up crazy, I just want her entire thought process to be flipped upside down. lol. I want to make you get to love evil bonnie just as she is. and yes, she drowned her father in a sink. **

**quick question just so i can get a feel - do we like Evil psycho Bonnie or do we want to restore balance to the force and make her good again by the end?  
**


	5. The Rhinoceros said to the Hybrid

**AN: I don't know how you actually see him, but I just now realised that I haven't really described the physical appearance of Silas. Which I really should have since he's an OC. But I guess by now you have a working image.**

**In case you don't, to tell you the honest truth, I came up with the image of Silas before I even started thinking about this fic. As soon as TVD mentioned Silas I came up with this pretty boy Egyptian character. **

**He's Hitsugaya-ish ( ****go-devil-dante . deviantart **art/Men-in-Skirts-Hitsugaya-35259959), 

**with the Scarlett Johansen face and red hair ( ****yeshairstyles **scarlett-johansson-iron-man-2-hairstyle-messy-curled-with-red-orange-coloring), 

**and has a back tattoo like Sydney Losstarot, ( ****deviantart . com **/ download / 112166182 / Sydney_ Losstarot_ by_ **SpoonyBardess . png** ). 

**Just get rid of the spaces and google the links.**

**Yes, this is how my brain works when I imagine characters. That's why I hate the tv version of game of thrones, none of their characters live up to what I had in my mind (esp Jaime and Renly and Loras – that was unforgivable casting blunders). Jon is this chubby emo, Theon is hard to look at even, Catlyn is wizened... Robb... Words can't describe how much HBO disappointed me with that show. The casting director should be burnt at a stake.**

**Don't know why I went Egyptian, probably just because of Shane's swarthiness and his Tudors role. And I rewatched the mummy recently.**

**And the narration of this is going back and forth through time a little bit, so don't get confused, it'll make sense by the end. Hopefully. Don't worry about it, more details to come in further chapters.**

* * *

He hadn't _wanted_ to break her neck. He didn't derive any pleasure from the act. Feeling her cervical vertebrae snap one by one by one…

It was just awful.

But it had had to be done.

* * *

"I feel like there's something you left out," Kol drawled as he gazed down on the dead girl. "I'm curious, though… She's a little bit…" Kol squinted, not exactly sure what he was looking at.

Klaus' head snapped up. "Don't touch!"

Kol smirked, but he pulled his hand back. Moreover, he put them in his pockets. "You know me. Seeing's not believing, until I start feeling."

Klaus stifled the comment just as it reached the tip of his tongue. Kol was a sadist. A masochist. A sociopath. A homicidal, suicidal freak in the body of a boy. Good-looking, but lethal. Like a Russian prostitute. But what else was new?

Now was not the time to be picky.

Now was the time for some ancient Persian magic.

"You ready?" he asked the blind albino nun.

The nun nodded and began to unwrap the layers of holy muslin. A layer of muslin soaked in the blood of a newborn lamb. A second layer soaked in the blood of a bull. A third layer of the muslin soaked in the blood of a white monkey. And the fourth layer of muslin soaked in the blood of Zoroaster himself.

Klaus watched as the nun's gloves began to smoulder as she touched the Living Grimoire, opening the tome of forbidden literature. The curtains went up in instant flame.

The ceiling caught flame.

And the sun went out.

* * *

It had occurred to him in the wee hours of the morning, while he was lying next to Lady Sauron's warm, dead body, raking his fingers through her hair, taking a quick drink or two from her veins, tracing his fingers over the contours of her ears and gazing into her lifeless glassy green eyes… While he was memorizing the curve of her lips and the little tips of fang peeking out, the shape of her face, the asymmetry of her eyes, the sheer cuteness of her nose and the ethereal whiteness of her hair… While he was memorizing her scent, it occurred to him, suddenly, that he was Klaus.

And that he'd been alive for a thousand years.

And that his mother had never loved him.

And that he'd never known his real father.

And that Mikael had hated him.

And that he had killed both his mother and Mikael.

He was Klaus. And maybe he wasn't six thousand years old, he wasn't five years old either. He'd strategized with kings. He'd travelled the world ten times over. He'd heard every song there was to hear. Read every book there was to read. Studied every science there was to study…

He was Klaus.

And he would not be made to cower by the likes of some newborn creature like Bonnie Bennett.

And that was when he remembered he'd wanted a pet.

He'd always wanted a pet. More than once, he'd considered buying himself a big, robust Rottweiler and naming it Fido, but inbetween dealing with his sister, and Stefan, and those disloyal fucking hybrids, he'd never gotten down to it.

Bonnie would make an excellent pet.

It was that thought that got him thinking…

* * *

Silas, when he thought about it, was irrelevant. The man had existed for six thousand years and if you asked Klaus, the man could just keep on surviving wherever he was.

The true gem… was Bonnie. The girl who had learnt to _express_ herself. She was strong. Almost as strong as he was. She was fast. Almost as fast as he was…

But she was just the little bit insane.

In 1802, he'd had the opportunity to see a man die of rabies. To see a man slowly lose the gift of rational thought… And it had been disturbing.

Bonnie reminded him of that man.

* * *

He watched as the tarantula crawled across the girl's face, mesmerized by the softness of the two poisonous creatures.

_Could he touch her as soft?_

* * *

Silas wasn't the first.

_Peri._

That was what the monks had called them. Manifestations of nature and power that were trapped within the physical world. Discarded angels that were denied the realm of paradise due to their lack of understanding, yet were too pure to be made to suffer penance.

_Peris_.

And they in turn were the target of a lower level of evil beings called the _daeva,_ who persecuted them by locking them in iron cages…

Shackles of holy iron.

Holy metal wrought from the gut of the Shastmali tribe…

His mind strained to remember the history. The history he had cast aside as idle foolish faerie tales made up by uneducated Tibetans too drunk on their own piousness.

_Daeva_.

And _Peri_. The weak-willed, neglected, fairy-soft creature with insufficient self-esteem to rebel against the perversion of the _daeva…_

The moths caught in the spider web of abuse, and lies, and neglect…

Silas, whatever he was, and Bonnie, whatever she was… were nothing new.

* * *

If his Hebrew was rusty, his grip on old Avestan was damn near abominable. And it didn't help that his eyes were bleeding.

"Hurry!" the albino hissed as her gloves dissolved into fragments.

His own skin wasn't handling it too well either.

"Seal the beast!" she hissed, her own blind eyes seeping blood.

_I'm trying... but everything's gone red._

* * *

"So," Kol, was the first one to speak. "Is it just me or are we all blind? I swear, my eyeballs just melted out of my skull."

Klaus sighed. "Mine too."

"I think my ears are bleeding. Ringing. Fucking painful."

Klaus. "Mine too."

"How long do you think it'll take to heal?"

Klaus shrugged.

* * *

It took five hours and forty-seven minutes for his eyes to heal.

It took nine hours and sixteen minutes for Kol's.

And the albino woman… she seemed to be permanently blind. And Klaus felt a little bad for her.

_Sucks to be you, I guess._

* * *

Was it just him, or was the albino Nun actually beautiful? She was young, now that he had the time to look at her. She couldn't have been older than thirty. Her skin was pure alabaster perfection. Her lips thin and pink. Her hair fell in loose curls around her shoulders, so blond… almost white. And around her throat, dangling on a thin silver necklace, a small ivory horn…

_She should never wear that habit again… _

He wanted to dress her. In something sheer, and gossamer thin…

And he wanted to touch the horn.

It looked smooth.

Cold.

_Is it cold?_

Something about it reminded him of diamonds. Gold. He had chests and chests of precious stones… Diamonds… rubies, emeralds…

_Is this what Sméagol felt like? _

Kol cleared his throat. "Brother, you're staring."

Was he?

"I'm not staring at your girl, Kol, it's just…"

It was just the horn... Dangling on the chain. It would take nothing to reach out and wrench it off the woman's thin neck.

What would it feel like?

_I bet it's cold…_

Kol cleared his throat again. "Brother, believe me when I say she's way out of your league."

Anger. "Why? Because she's a nun? I've had my fill of women of the cloth. It's no–"

"She's one of the Karkaddan."

His jaw snapped shut. _Right._

He knew that.

An awkward moment of silence passed where the three of them said nothing and did nothing.

There was little to say, really. He'd inadvertently burnt his house down to the ground. And the house next door…

To fuck with all the money he'd spent renovating the place…

The good news was that the sun had not permanently went out. It was out and shining down on them as radiant as ever.

Clear blue sky…

You never notice how blue the sky is until your house burns down to the ground and you find yourself exposed to the elements…

What was it with supernatural entities and fires? His entire house. Half a million, gone down the drain in half an hour. They'd cleared a little area free from rubble... and they were passing around a bottle of one of his vintage wines.

"So," Klaus began. "Thanks?"

Kol laughed. "Thanks? Are you serious?" He pointed to Bonnie who lay sprawled in the middle of them. "No _if_ or _maybe_ about it, you _are _explaining this."

"I don't have to explain myself to you!"

"If you want to borrow my rare ancient priestess, then you most definitely do!"

"How in all the layers of hell did you manage to find a Karkadann priestess in less than a day."

Kol smirked, "Hour and a half actually. I've got connections."

"With Karkadann priestesses?"

"Yeah."

"Have you touched it?"

Kol scoffed. "If you think she's beautiful with her clothes on, you haven't even begun to imagine what the rest of her is like. I'm talking supernumerary nipples here. Actual functioning lactating nipples. No hair either, smooth as a baby–"

"The horn," Klaus interrupted. "Have you touched the horn?"

Kol shrugged. "It's nothing big. Go ahead. Touch it."

Klaus' fingers were around the ivory trinket in a millisecond… "Oh…" he let it go as soon as he touched it. Then he gave his brother a glare, "Could have warned me."

"I could have, but you wouldn't have believed me. What happened?"

"I saw Henrik."

"How'd he look?"

"He looked like Henrik… Only a little bit older. A bit like you."

Kol frowned. "Huh. I saw Grandmother."

"How'd she look?"

"Like Grandmother. Only a little bit younger."

_Huh. _He could do without hallucinogenic jewels, there was more than enough going to keep him busy. He had just officially gotten himself involved in something that was way over his head. Something way _way _over his head. It wasn't as if he was some sudden expect at the prophecies of Zoroaster. It wasn't as if he'd spent his time in Tibet actually studying the lore. It wasn't as if he wore the beads around his neck as anything more than a fashion statement. Just sheer luck that he knew enough avestan to save his life. For goodness sake, his eyeballs had just melted out of his skull! Was there anything more foreboding? The Nun's hands had gone up in flames while she'd held the book dubbed the Living Grimoire… Lore said that the book was once a demon, and Zoroaster had fought it, mastered it, and bound it in cow-skin and snake-skin. And somehow the demon became a book – the details were vague on the how – and the book had to be watered daily with the blood of virgins and–

A pure white butterfly drifted down slowly… slowly… slowly… and landed on Bonnie's nose.

And then another… A ruby red butterfly fluttered down out of the skies and landed on the crook of her knee.

A cyan blue set of wings descended and landed on the slim curve of her belly…

* * *

She spoke in avestan, which made it a tad difficult for Klaus to follow but to the best of her knowledge, she was saying something about Silas.

In the earliest days of man, when Zoroaster the prophet had lived, there had existed a legend that foretold the birth of Silas. His father would be a _daeva,_ and his mother, one of the _peri_. Neither would know of their true nature. They would come together. Mate. And produce an abomination.

And so, the followers of Zoroaster had made it their lives mission to hunt down and imprison both the _peri_ and the _daeva_. But as time passed and the follower of Zoroaster became rare, _peri_ and _daeva_ alike fled from the rule of their guardians and scattered across the world, save for a single peri and a single daeva who despite their different natures were drawn to each other, and mated, and gave rise to the abomination that became known as Silas.

And Silas went out into the world and found Makasha, who was a child of the _daeva. _He awakened the evil in her, and they tormented the world until one faithful day when they conceived a child. The child would inherit the darkness of its parents, but also the dormant light that Silas had within him. And it was this light within the womb of Makasha that caused her to rebel against the evil that was Silas. She ripped his power from him and sealed him in a tomb never to be unearthed. Then she took the evil of the foetus into herself and gave birth to a pure and radiant _peri_ child. She sent the child away from her to the temples of foreign countries so that it would not learn of the sins of its mother. So that she would not shame him. Moreover, so that she would not shame herself, she bound up her own power according to the Bindings of Zoroaster, so that evil would never be free to roam the world again.

Klaus nodded as the ridiculously beautiful, blind Karkadan disguised as a nun went on and on about evil and good and blah, blah, blah… He couldn't really hear what she was saying though, the rustle of butterfly wings was deafening. He'd never seen so many butterflies in his life.

He'd never even cared for butterflies.

He'd crushed a couple in his hand, just for the fun of feeling the paper wings crumble in his hand. They'd never been anything special…"So Silas was correct then. He's technically, in a roundabout way, her father? She belongs to him?"

"Silas is an arrogant narcissist who's been spoilt rotten over the course of his life," the blind woman sneered. "He has been worshiped for so long, he actually believes he that he is a god. Damballah they call him in Africa. His culture is strongest there, but they worship him in other continents. Some dark parts of India and Sri Lanka. Oceania. Siberia… Haiti. Mexico. The Amazon jungles. He has footholds in every region–"

"If he's not a god, he can be killed?"

"You're not a god. Can I kill you? There are other solutions besides death. Zoroaster has left his knowledge for us in the Living Pages–"

"Why do we have to fight him? As far as I understand, he's stuck with the white magic half of his power. If Bonnie has the dark half, then doesn't that make her stronger than him? He should be afraid of her, the way I see it." What was to stop her from making the gypsy bastard explode? Same as she'd done to the brown dove.

She shook her head. "You don't understand."

Had he not said at the very beginning that his skill at Avestan was near negligible? Had he not announced that despite the decades he'd spent among them that he was no monk. No priest. He had no hidden knowledge about the forces of good or evil.

He knew Latin. He'd been a catholic for two centuries back in the 17th century. He'd been baptised a couple of times when the mood struck him to be pious, and he'd made a couple of confessions at the local church. Father forgive me, last night when I turned into a wolf, I think I mauled a family who were having a moonlight picnic out in the woods. What kind of twisted people have moonlight picnics… That was the extent of his knowledge of good and evil. A couple prayers. A couple hymns. A couple beads and some burning incense.

"Bonnie. Does not belong to him," the Nun declared firmly.

"She doesn't?"

"She's not one of his children. She's more like his sister." Her albino face curled into a triumphant smile. "Bonnie was sired by the loins of _another daeva _and carried in the womb of _another peri. _Another _peri _ that you should know. Her name was Ayanna."

"The Bennett?"

"Do you know any other?"

He knew one hundred and sixty-two Ayanna's. Common name. "Ayanna…"

"She didn't know what she was. She had the ability to heal. To save… Unlike your mother who tampered with darkness. Your mother is one of Silas' children. _You_ are one of Silas' children. The power you have within you belongs to him. Werewolves are his children. Vampires are his children. And you… I'm not sure what you are… By all the laws of Zoroaster, you should not exist."

_Ouch_. _Say that to my face, why don't you._

"Ayanna mated with a _daeva_ who disguised himself as a sickly traveller. She took him in, tended to his wounds _which were self-inflicted_, nursed him to health from his self-inflicted fever, and fell in love with him. She bore him seven children. All born dead. And then one more, a sad senseless mongoloid girl. The mongoloid survived. And as it is in the world, some wayward man found her, and filled her with his seed, and thus the Bennett line sprouted, continuing the unnatural duality of _peri_ and _daeva._"

"Somebody actually fucked Gatty?" Kol chuckled. "How desperate does a man have to be?"

Pretty desperate, Klaus had to acknowledge, but if it wasn't for that sicko a thousand years ago, there'd have been no Bennett line. Ayanna, such a self-righteous prude… Back then he'd never even given much thought as to how she'd ended up saddled with the half-wit child. The child was just an annoyance, a nuisance that no one, not even Ayanna, cared much for.

From Gatty to Bonnie…

A lot of changes had been made. Nature had corrected a lot of the blemishes… leaving behind just that crooked mouth…

He suddenly felt very old.

What would Ayanna think, he wondered, if she knew that her descendant was fresh off a massacre. Meek, timid, servile Ayanna...

Bonnie had inherited that… That air of servility. That lack of self-worth… that masochistic ability to suffer herself for the sake of others who gave very little of a rat's ass about her. Blind, naïve, virgin Bonnie that no one had cared about.

They'd all been distracted by their own petty wants.

_Bonnie doesn't mind…_

_She'll get over it…_

_It's Bonnie, of course she'll do it…_

_Bet you I can kill her mother, and she'll still be on our side…_

And Silas the snake had slithered his way into her life, and they watched him coil around her, poison her with his venom…

She'd had to kill an entire village in order for them to know something was wrong…

"She's a hybrid then," he pronounced, the gears of his brain stirring to life. "Same as I am. Except where I'm a mixture of evil and evil, she's an amalgamation of good and evil. Angel and demon."

Kol whistled, "That sounds utterly enticing."

The Nun turned her white eyes to Kol. "She's an abomination. And whether or not she's descended from Silas or not, she has piqued his interest. There is nothing he wants more than a mate. Someone who's his equal. He's been searching all the world over for someone like her. He's not even sure what she is. If he was, we wouldn't be having this conversation right now. He'd have already swooped in like the vulture he is. He saw her as a toy. We took that toy away."

"Can't he find someone else?"

"He already has. His children call to him, and he answers them. They worship him. There is no lack of persons he can access this dark power through. He can corrupt any person with the gift with his method of _expression, _and_–"_

"I think he knows what Bonnie is…" Klaus drawled,palming the ashy cold floor. To do a possession as thoroughly and perfectly as he'd done to Professor Shane… He'd had a clear purpose in mind. He'd tracked down Bonnie in particular.

"He doesn't."

"How can you be so sure?"

"Because Bonnie is still here," the Nun answered stonily. "He wormed his way into her mind. Awoken the _daeva _half of her nature, fucked her and let her loose to wreak havoc in this sleepy country town. What do you think he would have done if he'd known what she was? Fucked her? And risk impregnating her with Abomination Number Three? No. He thinks he's a god. They call him the Skyfather. The Skyfather rules alone, with no peers. No rivals. To find his true mate, and destroy her. That is his purpose."

"He'll kill her."

"If he finds her."

"How, though? If I'm following the story, they're both immortal."

She nodded. "The body is immortal. The soul is immortal. But separate the two? A houseless soul is but a breeze and an empty body is an abyss of nothingness." She paused for a moment and seemed to look at the slowly healing skin of her hands. "Nature can tolerate the existence of only one of these abominations. It will tear the other one apart. They cannot exist together in this realm. Silas is older. He has earned his right to walk the earth. He is worshiped. If we do not act she will pas away from this world like rain over the mountainside. Like wind in the meadow. Who is Bonnie but some foolish girl with horrible taste in men?"

Klaus thought about Jaime, the foster brother boyfriend and scowled. _Deplorable _taste in men…

* * *

Kol decided to drink the whiskey straight from the bottle as he stepped through the rubble to find his brother exactly where he'd left him so many hours ago. The sun had long set, and the smouldering ruins of Klaus' mansion was alive with ash and moonlight.

The butterflies were gone, replaced by what Kol imagined to be rabbits. Or hares. He could never tell the difference.

"Where's my nun chick?" he asked, nudging Klaus with the bottle of alcohol.

His brother took the bottle and emptied it. "She said she was going out to explore the neighbourhood."

"And you let her go by herself?"

"She seemed capable."

"She's blind."

"She's Karkadann."

Kol slumped down next to his brother on the floor, watching the rabbits snuggling up to the naked abomination that Bonnie Bennett apparently was. There were worse ways to spend a Friday night. "That's true. And besides that, everyone's dead. Except the Salvatores... So what are we doing, waiting for Sleeping Beauty, Hidden Demon to wake up?"

"I was working on a master plan, but yeah, more or less."

* * *

Very distantly, Silas became aware that they were playing his song. He hitched the girl's skirt up, pushed the crotch of her panties aside, a slid her down gently on his hard, demanding member.

_And I came home__  
__Like a stone__  
__And I fell heavy into your arms__  
__These days of darkness__  
__Which we've known__  
__Will blow away with this new sun._

"Asha," he panted in the crook of her neck, tasting her sweat with his tongue. In the flashing lights of the club, her eyes looked midnight black. Her dark skin reminded him of oil… Black gold.

"Dam," she moaned back, as her hips rocked with his rhythm. With the rhythm of the banjo. Drunk on blood and vodka and him…

_And I'll kneel down__  
__Wait for now__  
__And I'll kneel down__  
__Know my ground__And I will wait, I will wait for you__  
__And I will wait, I will wait for you_

Her cunt tightened around him and he held her there in perfect stillness watching the reflection of himself in her eyes. The quickest, simplest, most perfect fuck he'd had in a while.

_So break my step__  
__And relent__  
__You forgave and I won't forget__  
__Know what we've seen__  
__And him with less__  
__Now in some way__  
__Shake the excess__But I will wait, I will wait for you__  
__And I will wait, I will wait for you__  
__And I will wait, I will wait for you__  
__And I will wait, I will wait for you…_

He set her down on her feet shakily… He needed more from her. He needed more, but now wasn't the time. He'd come to the Watering Hole with the sole purpose of introducing the girl to civilisation… Fucking her up against a wall was the opposite of civilised.

They'd spent the day perusing the malls of Johannesburg, picking out clothes, mostly for her. He'd decided to make a statement and go with a short silk skirt. All the better to show off his ridiculously sexy new and improved bod. The only thing he would change was maybe his height. A couple of inches more wouldn't have hurt…

Asha… After gruelling hours, the girl had decided on a simple black lace mini skirt and a white tight corset. Why in the world the girl would choose to dress like a streetwalker was beyond him, but he hadn't complained. How could he? He could see the curve of her ass and her white thong whenever the breeze blew, and those impossible perky breasts seemed ripe to bursting as if they'd just explode… What red-blooded male creature under the sun would complain?

A tall ebony man gave him a thumbs up.

_Voyeuristic pervert scum._

He flashed the man a grin.

Africa. They'd always embraced him, despite the paleness of his skin and the colour of his eyes and the colour of his hair, despite his waifish built in a land where only the strong survived.

They saw the animal in him. And they respected him.

Ahsa's hand wiped away at her thighs as his cum trickled out of her… Her face full of confusion.

_Right… _

_Virgin, remember?_

To fuck with it. He'd gone a whole entire _week _without fucking her. He'd tried. Heaven knew, he'd tried. But really, had she given him a choice, dancing the way she was? Flashing that wondrously tight ass of her for all and sundry?

And they were playing his fucking banjo song!

_Cause I will wait, I will wait for you__  
__And I will wait, I will wait for you__  
__And I will wait, I will wait for you__  
__And I will wait, I will wait for you_…

The song finished.

And another one started up again…

_Sail._ Awolnation.

_God bless this DJ_.

He took the girl's hands in his, took a finger in his mouth and sucked it clean, reveling in their combined taste. "You feel good?"

She nodded, still confused, still intoxicated by him… "Thank you, father."

He smiled. The pleasure had been all his but whatever. He shouted over the music, "She said, just as social services arrived."

Nothing.

She didn't catch the joke.

How could she, ignorant pygmy child that she was? Social services? Ha. Her actual father had dragged her out to the river for the crocodiles to eat her.

Lol.

He took her by the hand and led her away from the wall they'd just copulated against. "I love this song," he shouted in her ear.

She nodded, happy just because he was happy.

On second thought, he didn't mind being so short. He didn't have to bend too much to capture her mouth… slide his tongue past her thin lips into her mouth.

He'd have to fatten her up though, he thought absently as his hands raked her sides to come up to her neck. Besides her breasts and her ass, not an ounce of fat to be found on her. All skinniness, ribs and slim thighs…

"I please you?" she asked, staring up into this face with a sort of questioning he hadn't seen in a couple of years. Devotion…

He nodded, cupping her heart-shaped face in his hands. Some anonymous god had taken his time, sculpting her into existence. some power had crafted her perfection. Whittled away any possible flaw. "Yes."

"More than this Bonnie you speak of?"

_Whoa… _He nodded, "Bonnie who?"

"The Bonnie you call to when you sleep?"

_Bonnie who?_

Bonnie the bitch he'd found in Mystic Falls… a cauldron of raw power just brimming over. Hot. _Caustic_. The most sinful delight he'd ever come across in all his life. One part angel one part hellspawn… and so very much like him. What he was like at that tender age of seventeen when he'd just begun to discover the true meaning of power.

"We're going to have to hunt her down and kill her," he shouted in the girl's ear.

She nodded.

_Sail _came to an end and the DJ cranked up Moby's _Extreme Ways._

_I would stand in line for this__  
__There's always room in life for this._

* * *

The Nun rolled up the marijuana cig and lit it. She took a hit and passed it to Klaus. "You did good, incapacitating her in time."

He nodded.

"We've bound the beast. Or I should say that _you've _bound the beast – the _daeva _half of her. When she wakes–"

"She'll be back to normal again?"

The Nun scoffed. "Normal? What does that word even mean? Human? She was never human. She knows that now. When she was a human she thought and acted like one, but she knows what she is now. Or more precisely, what she isn't. She's eaten human flesh. Her _daeva_ nature has been suppressed for so long, it wants nothing more to be free. We're going to have to repeat the sealing process every day."

"And that'll be enough to keep her under control?"

The nun took a deep drag of her illicit cig when Klaus passed it back. "There's no controlling her. That's not what I'm here for. I'm here to see that she wins. I'm here to bear witness to the end of Silas the Skyfather. To see the obliteration of Damballah. But just as I am here on your side, Silas will go to the Shastmali when he realises what she is, or they will go to him. They will work together to bind her in holy metal and she will be destroyed. Torn asunder and scattered like dust in the air." She passed the cig back.

Normally, Klaus would say no to drugs, but the night seemed to call for it. He was standing in the presence of a Karkadann priestess. He had read from the Book of Zoroaster. His house had burnt down. His eyes had melted out of his skull… "Today's her birthday."

"You don't say," the woman replied dryly.

She was too young to be so hard, and cynical and jaded, Klaus thought, but then again, maybe she wasn't. Maybe she was just as ancient as he and Silas. What did he know about the Karkadann? "So what's the plan?"

"_Daeva_ get stronger by eating the flesh of other _daeva_. They are a cannibalistic species that survive on flesh and blood and bone. And in the end, there can be only one who will be the consummate of dark power. We can't let Silas win."

"So what do we do? Go hunt down every witch, vampire and werewolf and offer them up to Bonnie on a platter? How 'bout I serve myself up while we're at it?"

She smiled. "That's why we bound her. She–"

"Guys?" Kol called from within the ruins of what used to be his house.

"Yeah?"

"She's waking up."

* * *

"Karkadann?" Bonnie directed to the Nun scowling. "Didn't know you existed."

"We exist when we have to."

Bonnie raised her eyebrows and nodded. Everything about her movements was slow. Stiff. "Klaus?"

"Yes, love?"

"Break my neck again, and I'll rip you to pieces, understand?"

Klaus shrugged. "It was either that or allow myself to be violated. How do you feel?"

"Oh," Bonnie stood up and stretched restrictedly, fastening the robe around her. "Like if I ate my best friend and her boyfriend, killed my father, got raped, ate a shitload of cartilaginous babies and a pony and… Like a hangover, I guess, but worse. I feel a little bit hungry. I feel a little bit constipated, dirty, ashamed... I _feel_ as though the two of you have put a leash on me, and I resent that down to my core. I _feel_ a little bit confused as to why Kol's here–"

"Just passing through, darling."

"I'll eat you tomorrow. And don't call me _darling,_ you laughing jackal. Karkadann," Bonnie's cold green eyes bore down heavily on the pale woman. "What do they call you?"

"The Nun."

"And you're fucking this rat bastard? How pious of you."

Kol frowned. "Let's not get personal, darling."

"Don't fucking _darling_ me!" she screamed suddenly, causing all the hairs on Klaus' back to rise.

_Danger._

His eyes turned black, as his body began to shift in anticipation of a scuffle. So much for getting the old Bonnie back. The _Real Bonnie. _The one that was soft, and forgiving, who'd live and die for you if you asked her two. She'd changed her life to suit Elena's mood, to accommodate Damon's whims and Stefan's noble requests. It made him sad, just a little bit, as he remembered her tears and how beautiful she was when she was just a human girl.

_Danger._

They stared each other down for a long moment. Anomaly versus Abomination… Then she smiled. "You son of a fucking bitch, Klaus - and do not deny it, she was a fucking bitch," she said, with a little laugh. "All you had to do was say no. But I get it. I'm not your type. Not blonde enough, I suppose… And by the way, who burnt down the house? Not important. What's important is that while I were sleeping, I realised that I hadn't killed Matt. Fucker's still alive. Held up in the Grille's basement. Let's go kill him tonight. Then how' bout we go rounds up the Salvatore, Elena and her precious little brother."

The Karkadann frowned. "We have no time for this pettiness–"

"This isn't petty!" Bonnie snapped. "This is personal! First things first!"

* * *

**Isn't _Sail _by awolnation the most perfect song ever? This whole entire chapter was inspired by that song.**

**I'm just making up mythology for these witches because a) the tvd writers never bothered, b) it doesn't make sense that witches created vampires and yet vampires are able to kill them so easily. So basically what I'm saying is that all the witches we've seen so far on tvd are just operating on a basic first floor level of magic, and that they aren't human at all, but really powerful elements of nature, they just need to learn to **_**express**_** themselves. And there are basically two type of people who can do magic – the _daeva_ who do dark magic, and the _peri_ who do white magic. Silas and Bonnie are 2 good magic-dark magic hybrids. All the rest of stuff I'm just borrowing and adapting from Persian and African mythology. (really interesting stuff). Don't worry, I'll flesh it out more and more as the story progresses. I didn't want to make the chapter too much of an info dump. PM me if something's really confusing you. **

**Anybody ever think that the amount of time we spend doing fanfic we could be writing our own independent work of fiction? I mean… I have a half-finished screenplay that I haven't touched since September last year… ****.**

**Comments, suggestions, reviews, feelings that you want to share? Hit me with 'em.**

**And I REALLY have to study now!**


	6. Something about birthdays

**AN: I, the unrivalled champion of procrastination, did not study this weekend except for one makeshift ppt on intussusception. I decided to watch Banshee, and some episode of subrugatory, modern family and sunny in philly that I had in stock. Rewatched reservoir dogs, just because.**

**And if you going to watch tv, just because, you might as well do a little writing.**

**For my peeps: Disgusting eww/eh? chapter… lol**

* * *

_Danger._

They stared each other down for a moment that seemed to stretch out towards infinity.

Anomaly versus Abomination…

_Kill. _

Every instinct for self-preservation that he had developed in the course of his thousand year lifetime was telling him to kill the _thing_.

_Kill it. _

He'd never have a better opportunity.

As immortal as he was… She could end his existence with a wish. With a single batting of those unnaturally long, unnaturally white eyelashes.

But she was smiling. A pained forced smile that didn't make it anywhere near her eyes. Those perfect demonic eyes that held him steady… That made him think about new green grass Cornwall, and sweet, cold dew on the moors…

"You son of a fucking bitch, Klaus – and do not deny it – she was a fucking bitch," she said, strained. An odd tension making her jaw tight. A little laugh, that was more of a cry...

_A whimper._

"All you had to do was say _no_. But I get it. I'm not your type–"

She dabbed at her leaking eyes and her fingers came away red. Bloody. She wiped again, and stared in empty wonder.

_Wonder…_

_How I wonder what you are…_

Like the inebriated woman who stands barefoot in the streets after midnight having an argument with a deaf and dumb lamppost, with her dress falling off her shoulder, nostrils raw with cocaine, Bonnie tottered, off balance, fingers fumbling with the knot in her robe… "Not blonde enough, I suppose…"

She let the robe fall.

Fine white black scribbling covered her like a body tattoo, ending sharply at her neck, wrists and ankles. Fine black writing that seemed _burnt_ into her skin by a white hot stencil.

Avestan.

The words of the book he had just read.

He had literally bound her with his words. The old words of Zoroaster…

He had bound her.

The enormity of his situation slowly blossomed into the mushroom cloud that it was.

Bonnie, the girl who'd been the Mystic Falls' doormat, had turned out to be a demon. Or a demon-angel hybrid… An abomination of the worst kind… More lethal, more atrocious than he could ever dream to be…

A thing, more beast than man. More hurricane than flesh. More… than any force of nature he had ever born witness too… more than any power he had ever imagined. And he had bound her.

She had let him bind her.

She had let him break her neck. Instead of hurting him, she had allowed him to hurt her… As she had always done ever since the day he'd met her. The day she'd claimed to be the most badass bitch in the county, just to make herself sound tough in front of one Damon Salvatore who used to scare the shit out of her.

_Bonnie_. He couldn't get her name out of his head. He didn't want to. He wanted to remember everything about this moment…

She tottered again, this time tumbling to her knees. "And by the way, who burnt down the house?"

A spew of red and black vomit erupted from her mouth. Litres and litres of gory waste… spreading across the tile. Wetting his boots.

"Not important." She coughed. A nasty, productive bout of hysterical coughing. Black sputum. Red sputum. And red blood tears running free down the sides of her face. She was on all fours, hunched over like a sick, poisoned mongrel that anyone with a heart should put down. Bash its brains in with a well-placed kick, show a little mercy... "What's important–" another eruption of chunky blood vomit. Foul smelling, thick and acidic. The claws of her hands extended, gripping into the tile. "What's important is that while I was sleeping, I realised that I hadn't killed Matt." Just above the crack of her ass a tail started growing out. Rapidly growing out to about four six feet… She hunched over, her scaphoid stomach tightened further and then the fetid odour of faeces hit the air. "Fucker's still alive. Held up in the Grille's basement–" She convulsed again, venting at both ends… Bloody drool seeping from the corners of her mouth and off her fangs. He thighs plastered in blood and her own stinking shit… Let's go kill him tonight." The tears were flowing steadily now. Her breath was coming short. And the hair… that glorious tumble of white silk started falling out in clutches. She reached up vapidly and took a handful off her head easily, staring at it in open confusion.

And out of nowhere she laughed. A real happy laugh though he could see her face contort with pain and effort. "How' bout we go rounds up them Salvatores, Elena and her precious little _brother_."

The Karkadann frowned. She had a bag of salt in hand, Klaus noticed. A bag of salt that she'd used to make a circle around Bonnie. A little barrier of sorts to keep the black blood and the faeces inside. Containing the rot… "We have no time for this pettiness–"

"This isn't petty!" Bonnie snapped. "This is personal! First things first!"

"Yes, love."

Her bleeding green eyes met his with a mixture of hope and accusation. "You bound me," she growled at him in Avestan, her voice so low and sinister, it held him entranced. He could only nod. "You fucking dog," she barked with a teasing smile on her face, all fangs and red blood. "Today's… my _birthdaaaaa–_"

And then came the wings, ripping out of her back. Large, bat-like wings. Pink and bloody.

And there went the saying that there was nothing new under the sun.

There'd never been a girl like Bonnie before under the sun. He would have heard about it. Caught her scent on the air.

Bonnie groaned, her hands shaky, collapsing under her… she slumped down into the puddle of her own putrid filth. "Worst birthday ever," she groaned. Those beautiful eyes never ever looking away from his own. "Even monsters deserve better than this…" She flopped onto her side.

Pain.

He could hear, even see, the chaos going in within her. Her spine rippling wild, bones breaking and readjusting, recreating new limbs, new postures. Her thighs tightened to sinew, her fingers webbed…

_Transition_…

Always a pain in the ass, that.

And the tears… More than the wings, or the tail, or the ever-growing swamp of regurgitated blood, the tears were what he noticed. His fingers wanted to wipe her cheeks clean.

He wanted to hold her close to him and promise her that she'd never cry again. That she'd never hurt again. That a time would come when she wouldn't even recall the meaning of the word _pain_.

This poor unloved girl that he'd never truly seen before…

This ephemeral embodiment of godhood. Of immortality and death intertwined.

This bewitching creature that use to be someone that he hadn't known very well when she was for all intents and purposes human…

His own eyes were betraying him now… _Damned tear ducts._

"Wings," she whispered weakly. Old Avestan rolling off her tongue with her American teen accent as if she'd spoken it every day of her life. "Insane, right?"

He managed a smile, just a little one. "Insanity in individuals is something rare - but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule." Some insane human had said that.

Her claws trembled over the tile, making scribbling shapes in her vomit. "Rule… Can you play that song? That fairy-tail song you love so much? It's like a lullaby… I think everything will be better after I sleep."

"Just close your eyes, love. You're my pet now, I'll keep you safe."

* * *

Kol passed the bottle of vodka to the Nun and cracked open a bottle of whiskey for himself. "I know what I'm telling you," he sighed as he climbed back into the bed. "He's my brother. He's been my brother for over a thousand years. I know him better than I know myself most days – you know how erratic and spontaneous I can be at times – point is, I'm telling you, that he's not going to go for that."

The Nun took a swig out of her bottle. The heady taste of alcohol going straight to her brain. She shouldn't be having alcohol. Really, she shouldn't. First because she wasn't human. Second, because she wasn't old enough. Come tomorrow she'd be a grand whopping 16 days old.

Did it matter though that she didn't exist a month ago? She existed _now. _And she was naked in a luxurious four poster bed with one of the most beautiful creatures ever created.

What did anything matter?

"Kol…" she curled herself against him, revelling in the feel of his coldness on her nipples. "She's too weak."

"Klaus won't do it."

"He's the only one who can!" she pulled herself up onto his chest, kissing his collarbones, the apple in his throat. "For some reason or the other, she let herself be bound by him–"

"She didn't let herself be bound, he broke her neck."

"She _let _him break her neck. You don't see it, but she can kill the two of you as easy as blinking. As easy as she's killed every other thing in this town. The only reason you're alive is because in some recess of her mind, she wants to keep you alive."

"If she kills us, she kills all the vampires we ever sired. Including her friends."

"Her friends who she currently wants dead?" The Nun held him firmly by the chin, forcing eye-contact. "Her brain's rattled right now. She hasn't put everything together, but when she does… She'll kill you."

Kol smiled, cheeky as ever, "And you'll miss me, and all the various ways I make you come without actually sticking my cock in you."

The Nun's pale face coloured cherry pink. "I'll miss you for how beautiful you are. And how wild you are. And for holding my hand when I was lost in the airport…"

It's one thing to be a Karkadann priestess, destined to follow in the order of Zoroaster and maintain the balance of nature and power, good and evil. It was another completely different thing, navigating through the throngs of Heathrow asking for directions from anyone who might happen to know where a "Niklaus Mikaelson" or a "Bonnie Bennett" might live.

"_Are you really blind, or do you just have white pupils? Can you see me?" _That was the first thing he'd asked her.

"_I see you. You're the roguish little brother."_

"_You can tell all that already? Is it the sly smirking, the dimples, the lecherous winking? What gave me away?" _

She'd known him because he was in the Ledger, as simple as that, with a black and white picture and a name on the right. She'd glimpsed his picture when she was looking for Klaus' and he'd just sort of stuck in her mind.

So what if the world was coming to an end… When next would she get the chance to consume spirits with a homicidal, maniacal, sexual god? The things he'd done to her with his fingers… With his tongue…

"Silas is so much stronger than she is…" she spoke into his chest softly. "He's going to find her and devour her. Then he's going to be unstoppable."

Kol traced his fingers through the woman's honey coloured, honey scented hair. "I get what you're saying. I'm not a complete idiot, but I'm telling you that my brother is. He's a _complete_ idiot. One of those lovesick fools who cause the deaths of countless others because they were too blind to see what was in front of them? Like the captain of the Titanic? My brother Klaus is like a five year old boy. All you need is a lollipop– Not even a lollipop, you just have to _promise_ him a lollipop. Tell him that you'll buy one for him _after_ he gets into the illegally tinted panel van spray-painted _"Den of Ass Rape"_ on the side, and guess what? He _will _get into the van."

The Nun chuckled. Klaus, the little she'd seen of him, seemed confident. He was what someone became when they got too powerful to be hurt. He was a man that had forgotten fear…

"She'll kill him."

"If she can kill him, he'd let her," Kol smirked. "He'd love nothing more than to be killed by a woman. In his mind it will all be very Shakespearian." He sighed… "He's flesh and blood, and he _seems_ real. He _seems_ sane. But underneath the upper class wit and incredible fashion sense is a sad little man-child with daddy issues. And Mummy issues. And a sister fetish. He spends his days watching birds nesting, and keeping track of their migration numbers when winter comes. He paints portraits of sunrise. He drinks wine and reheats store bought apple pies in the microwave. He donates a million dollars every year to the Australian cricket league and he went on a walkabout for three days. He buys libraries. He goes to Home Depot once a week. He has five hundred and fifty nine storehouses in his name because he's a hoarder–"

"And?"

"And, I'm telling you, that a man who owns every Elvis Presley vinyl album and a _gramophone,_ is not and will never as long as he has breath in his body relinquish his ownership of whatever the fuck it is that blood harpy is. He bound her. He _literally_ owns her. No way in heaven or hell he goes along with your plan."

"My plan is the only way for the two of you and every living being on this planet to survive. I'm going to do it."

"What?"

"Get Klaus to kill her. Free the world from her magic. Keep Silas from getting any stronger than he already is."

Kol frowned. "That is the most naïve string of sentences I have ever heard uttered in my entire existence. And when I say that, keep in mind that I've run through at least a million airheads. You are…" he smiled, "You're just like a newborn. So full of hope and virginal goodness. Maybe that's why you're so special… I don't think I've ever literally _slept _with a virgin before. This is all so curious… I feel like Alice, tumbling down a sexy rabbit-hole…"

* * *

He'd never had a pet before… so he didn't know exactly what to do with this new one.

He sat by its side and watched it transition slowly into its true from. The tail, the wings, the claws, the hair…

She was very much like a gargoyle, he thought. Except flesh, instead of stone… and perfectly beautiful.

* * *

Klaus hummed along with the soft music as he dipped the rag into basin of warm water. Say what you wanted about the Lockwood, they had impeccable taste when it came to interior designing. The bathroom, just spectacular. "All the stars are coming out tonight, they're lighting up the sky tonight… For you… For you…" he used his fingers to wipes away a persistent smudge of dried blood from her cheek.

"Klaus?"

He froze. The softness in her voice had him frozen. He'd never heard it before… not even when she'd been the goody-good witch.

He'd never heard someone say his name quite like that. So… So provocatively. It made him want to kneel. To salute. To kiss her feet. To kiss her. Hold her close to him and feel her warmth on his skin… The way mothers held their newborns…

His little newborn.

He wanted to coo. Stroke her cheek… Kiss her forehead… Anything to let her know that he was there. That he'd be her mother, father, brother, sister, friend…

Nevermind who said she was an abomination.

"Klaus?" her cracked lips whispered again. Her beautiful eyes closed. Her body, weak and limp, submerged in the luxurious, Stern McCafferty glass walled tub.

"I'm here, love," he managed. He managed a smile too for his own benefit, because for some reason, he could feel the tears welling up behind his eyes. Some sort of random emotion making him into some soppy soft-hearted _idiot_.

"What happened?" she croaked. Voice deservedly hoarse after all the screaming she'd done. All the vomiting. All the crying.

"You transitioned. You changed."

"Into what?"

"Well," he wasn't exactly sure himself. "You had wings… like a dragon. Horns, like a baby devil. A tail, that was just fantastic. Snake eyes… In honesty, I'd say you were a gargoyle. You looked exactly like a gargoyle that a friend of mine made back in 1302. Of a beautiful fallen angel. The church had it torn down, of course, blasphemy and all that, but that is what you reminded me of. It was beautiful."

"Oh." Whisper soft. Her face slackening again as she began to drift away from him again.

"Was it painful?"

She nodded slowly, eyes still closed.

"How do you feel now?"

She smiled weakly… "I like this. Continue."

_Ha_.

_Continue… _she says…

And continue he did. Washing the filth off her petite frame. She didn't flinch when his hands moved over her breasts, soaping her clean… She didn't flinch when his hands moved down her belly, down between her thighs, between her ass, scrubbing the muck and grime loose… On the underside of her knees, over her ankles, between her toes… Peeling away the dead skin and membrane.

She was asleep again, by the time he was done. He pulled her out of the tub… and just held her against him for a moment. Nevermind how wet she was. Nevermind that she was ruining his last Jeansian V-neck.

He remembered holding the dead, cool body of Henrik… bringing him back to the village, back to Mikael…

There was no Mikael now. No one that he was responsible to. No one to judge him… but some vestigial portion of his heart was telling him to _keep this one alive._

_Keep this one safe._

He'd daggered his family, killed his parents. Killed his hybrids…

But he would keep this one alive.

* * *

Silas paused with the straightening iron in hand. It was as straight as it was ever going to get, sadly. He pulled his hair up into a stylish, scruffy ponytail.

"So," he swivelled in his chair towards the girl on the bed playing Angry Birds for the first time in her life. "This is the story. I'm the leading protagonist. I'm all powerful, in theory. The world is mine. I am the Skyfather and undisputed King of the world."

Asha spared half a second to give him a confirming nod.

"And you're my sidekick. You're the one who's actually going to have to get your hands dirty. We've a _lot_ of people to hunt down, kill and eat. And _you're_ the one who's going to do all the killing and eating and whatnot because these hands…" _the useless small girly hands… _"these hands of mind cannot be soiled. They're… pure."

Asha nodded. Not bothering to look up.

"_We _are the heroes. You know who the enemies are?"

"The cocksuckers, the motherfuckers and the bitch," Asha muttered as she reached a new level. Each level… it just got harder and harder… But she was getting better and better at it. She was fifth on the leader board. Just six thousand points between herself and first place.

"First off," Silas untied the ponytail. He'd go with the ruby-studded snood instead. Red to bring out his eyes. It's not every day a fella felt like Ray Bans. He fixed the snood on his head pulling out a few strands to frame his cheek. _There_.

And maybe the ruby-silver cuff bracelet.

And the earrings…

Except his ears weren't pierced. Every single reincarnation, always the same problems with the ear piercing. Forty times he's pierced his ears, and yet…

He pushed the earring into his lobe, ignoring the minor burn and the little bit of blood.

"First off – the cocksuckers. Damon, Stefan, Elena and Jeremy. They're a batch of brats who think they're all that. That the world revolves around them and their precious princess doppelgänger. I want them to die slowly, and painfully. Got that?"

"Slow and painful," Asha echoed. Five thousand, eight hundred and twenty-two points between her and first place now. By sunset, early tomorrow morning… She'd be number one.

"Then the motherfuckers."

"The Mikaelsons. Buried alive in the Himalayas. _Undaggered _for all eternity. I've been listening," she droned.

"Really, because ever since I bought you that phone, it's all you have time for. You've looked at me… twice? For the entire day?"

"It's a nice phone."

"But not better than the Note 2."

"I prefer this one."

"Because… Because it's your first phone and you don't know any better."

"Because I'm nothing but a stupid pygmy girl."

Silas turned back to the mirror, inspecting his face for any flaws. "Your words, not mine." Pause. "What are you even playing? Temple Run?"

"Angry Birds. In space."

"There's one in space?" During his stint in Professor Shane's middle-aged yet vaguely attractive carcass, he'd fallen out of touch with a few things. Angry Birds… _in Space… _

He'd investigate that later.

Right now, he had passport photos to take. ID cards to get made.

A car to buy. Possibly. If he could get somebody to teach Asha how to drive.

_Ugh… _the thought alone scared him. Iron and steel and carbon frameworks… Flammable gasoline. Like manufactured death. _Automobiles_? Ha. _Death_mobiles more like. So complicated. Traffic lights. One way streets. Two way streets. Highways. Freeways. Tunnels. And God, all the intersections, and turn-offs and merging traffic. Detours. Road work. Precipices.

_Gasoline_.

And _seatbelts_!

_You were literally strapping yourself to death! _

Thank the gods for immortality.

"And Bonnie?" Asha threw him out of his daytime fantasy of explosions and vehicular chaos. "What about your lady love, Bonnie," she teased.

What about Bonnie? Every day he had something different in mind for her.

He wanted to fuck her again. A part of him wanted to feel her come around his own natural cock. But mostly, he was thinking about killing her.

He could smell it in the air. Her heady intoxicating essence of danger.

Something dangerous was in play. A game was afoot.

Chess, with only two pieces – a king (himself) and a pawn (Asha).

He'd have to Queen her asap.

"Bonnie…" he mused, "I'm not sure how I want to kill her as yet. But we've got time. I'll figure something out. Something creative. You think about it too, that's what sidekicks are for, you know. To help come up with master plans."

"You looked better with the ponytail," she suggested with a shrug.

Silas squinted his eyes at her. "I know… But it's just not… aristocratic, is it? I'm declaring myself king of the world with a ponytail?"

He wiped out his Samsung Galaxy Note II, still spanking new, smiled, and snapped a quick photo of himself, all teeth and cheeks. He added in a couple cheesy balloons and a text box.

_"Thinking about you, Happy B-day! Wish I was there!_

_Love u so much! Love, Big Daddy. _

_Xoxoxoxoxo times a trillion!"_


	7. The best things in life are belated

**AN: This whole fic isn't about me. It's about the characters I make up. Some of them might have opinions that I don't agree with. Like Silas thinking about Africans as primal animalistic people. That's just his view because of his 6,000 year lifespan and his religious/ personal/ magical/ social experiences in Africa, which I'll get more into. Never meant to imply that Africans or Afro-descended people were in anyway animalistic. So sorry for that.**

**For the record, I don't condone cruelty to animals. I've had to put a pet to sleep once, but that was because it was in an accident and the internal injuries were too much for the vet to fix.**

**I also don't condone cannibalism and baby-eating. (Unless you're in one of those situations where you absolutely **_**have**_** to turn cannibal, like in that movie Alive, and then **_**if**_** there's a baby around, then yes, it's clearly the most logical thing to eat the baby first, because after all, 1) it's the least likely to survive 2) it would be the easiest one to cook, 3) the surplus baby fat will help you survive longer and 4) it's better to eat a baby than a full grown person who's already developed a life, has dependents, has responsibilities). **

**Lol?**

**Not lol?**

**Last chapter for a while, (insert sad-face) until halfway in February. I'm going to test out this thing they keep talking about. Discipline… Whatever that means… Have to study my ass off.**

**Chapter changes POVs multiple times.  
**

* * *

It wasn't a bad song, Bonnie conceded as she lay there, weak and limp under the bed sheets, snuggled up warm and tight against the hybrid. Every bone in her body hurt. Her face hurt. Her back hurt. Every inch of her sore as if she'd been in a hit and run with a Mack truck.

And she was cold. As the ice was inside her. As if her blood had turned to liquid nitrogen. As if she'd never be truly warm again. As if she was some kind of lizard, incapable of generating its own heat.

_All the stars are coming out tonight,_

_They're lighting up the sky tonight, _

_For you..._

Klaus and his nonsensical fascination in grown men singing about balls of gas millions of miles away...

Despite the abundance of throw pillows, her head rested comfortably on the bicep of his arm... She lay there watching the fine golden hairs move with her breath, in and out. in and out. Inhaling his soothing aura of controlled anarchy. He smelt like musky cologne, blood and apples...

Why apples, she wondered. The scent was all over him, as if he'd had a bath in cider.

It wouldn't surprise her if he did.

"You smell like apples." It was only when she spoke that she realized she was still crying. She could smell the blood, taste it on her lips... Why she was crying? She didn't know. Only humans were supposed to cry. Only the weak.

"Oh, you didn't know?" His voice was so soft. So near. Reminding her of how her grams would whisper evening prayers to her while she slept.

_Now I lay me down to sleep..._

Except he wasn't the kindly old grandmother. He was the wolf, wasn't he? She could feel his mischievous smile as his lips came within millimeters of her ear, "Hybrids only eat apples."

"Apples and little girls," she amended.

"True. But you've got nothing to fear sweetheart, you're all bone and gristle. Wings and all that? Too much trouble." And his arm tightened around her, comfortably... Comforting.

She wanted to say that she wasn't a little girl anymore. To remind him that she was a monster now, but she didn't want to start an argument. She just wanted to lie there, and feel the thud of his heart reverberate through her frame.

_How did it come to this?_

That she, Bonnie Bennett, the last of her line and an abomination in her own right now should seek his solace. That she should retreat into his arms.

He, _Klaus_.

One of his arms under her head, the other, under her breasts pulling her back flush against his chest, his warm legs wrapped up with her cold ones, trying to keep the frostbite off her toes.

As much as he was the scum of the world, she had to concede, it wasn't the worst thing imaginable to be this close to him, wrapped up in his cocoon...

* * *

The next time she woke, the sun was up, bright and hot and shining down on her because some asshole had drawn the drapes back and thrown open the windows...

And it burnt a little bit.

The sun.

The big bright yellow sun she used to live and breathe under. She didn't like it anymore…

It was… irritating.

The air was rank and putrid with all the carcasses of her rampage a week ago. Her slain.

Amazing that no one had cleaned the mess up, really. But she supposed she may have killed whoever's job it had been to sweep dead bodies off the street. She'd killed the sheriff's department, the fire department, most of the people of the city hall... Daddy Mayor.

And more irritatingly, Klaus was gone. His warmth. The bed sheets had gone cold and even his impression on the mattress was gone. Not even a wrinkle remained...

The cocoon shattered...

There was annoying music playing downstairs. Loud, alternative pop... The kind of noise she used to like when she'd been human. Whenever that had been…

Kings of Leon.

Taper Jean Girl.

She and Jeremy had danced to that song for her senior prom. His hands always finding some reason to touch her, his constantly smiling face, and stupid brown hair done up with too much gel...

There was a rack of clothes in the middle of the bedroom. And a pile of underwear, panties, bras, and things she couldn't recognize in one of the chairs.

Klaus.

She picked out a pair of black boy shorts, a thin strapped black push-up bra that made her B cup body look like a C cup.

Ribs were visible, she noticed when she studied herself in the mirror. And the elf ears were gone. The claws were gone. The white hair... was still white, but Klaus she supposed had cut it shorter, back to its original length. He'd even given her back some bangs.

How fucking thoughtful.

And the clothes.

Everything designer. Things she would never have been able to afford on the meagre allowance her father would donate when he was alive. Things she would have highlighted in the magazines and put on her Christmas wish list. Pretty clothes, perfect for a normal human girl...

She took down a white chiffon shirt off a hanger, pushed her hands through the sleeves then began to work on the buttons...

Humans wore clothes. And just because she wasn't human anymore- or rather just because she knew she wasn't human anymore, didn't mean she had to go around like an animal... Down on all fours like a beast the way Silas had wanted her. Mindless. Rabid. Servile... Like a diseased pitbull. His bitch...

Pants... She didn't really need it; the shirt fit her like a small dress.

All the money he'd spent on clothes... Like she was some plastic doll he could play dress up with.

Fuck pants.

And fuck the fancy shoes. She slid her feet into a pair of thin-soled slippers...

* * *

"See what I mean?" Kol intoned as he cut a slice of black forest cake onto a saucer. "You want to kill her, he throws her a birthday party."

"Hmm..." the Nun committed. One way or the other, _one_ of the abominations had to die. Silas or Bonnie, didn't really matter much to her. All she was saying is that it would be_ easier_ to do away with the new girl instead of Silas the self-declared Skyfather... but if Klaus wanted to do it the hard way and go up against the dark tyrant, who was she to oppose? She had on job. To feed the book. The helpful suggestions were just a bonus... for Kol's sake. What did she care really?

The Nun surveyed the display of sweet confectionery... This was something new. Something she had no opinions on whatsoever. Sugar didn't exist at the Ledger house. They survived on the pure water of the earth and the flower petals that came to them on the wind.

Ice cream. With cookies in it.

Ice cream. With strawberries...

She unwrapped a plastic fork and took a taste of Kol's slice.

A forkful of magic...

Kol surveyed the confusion his brother had created in the Lockwood house, all in the matter of an hour...two tops. Helium filled balloons covering the entire ceiling. Cakes. A gigantic banner reading "_Happy Birthday Bonnie", _with_ "even though it was yesterday" _scribbled in underneath. Crayon drawings of butterflies, chubby bumble bees and skinny bats with blood dripping from their fangs...Buckets and buckets of ice cream. Confetti, and white baby rabbits with cute red bows tied around their necks... A bubble machine… because those still existed. And Gloria's jukebox… Butterflies all over the place dripping pollen...

...And three vampires.

And one Hunter.

Cake crumbs went down Kol's trachea as he watched the Salvatores, the Katherine Clone and his best friend, the Vampire Hunter.

Jeremy.

The little uppity human bastard that he'd tried time and time again to kill, with no avail.

The little shit who had tried to kill _him._

The fucker who had done away with Elijah...

Elijah, missing since the New Spring Ball, last seen in conversation with the fair princess Elena and her adorable little baby brother... baby cousin.

There was no doubt in Kol's mind what had become of his big brother. He, and every vampire he had sired, had been sacrificed by those vapid cocksuckers all in the name of extending the tattoo, all in the name of turning Elena mortal again, all in the hopes of breaking the sire bond, all to determine truly and irrevocably which of the Salvatore brothers she loved best.

Oh what he wouldn't give to wring there little necks one by one. To rip their hearts out slowly. Glacier slow…

One by one, they entered the majestic Lockwood Manor. All bright eyes and smiles. As if they hadn't spent a week and a half taking up refuge in the church. What insanity had possessed them, he wondered, to come out of hiding and furthermore, to walk into the den of the dragon.

They were carrying gifts, even. Big boxes, gift wrapped with big fairy bows. Elena held a mewling black kitten in a Dorothy Basket...

And Klaus... Following them in, carrying three cases of beer... Dressed up like some eccentric European footballer who just discovered linen, replete with all his necklaces, beads and choker. The bastard had even gotten a haircut. Very low, very suave...and wild in a vague sort of way.

_Ohhh… _Kol stuffed a forkful of chocolaty goodness into his mouth, barely containing the laughter that was just ready to burst out.

And Bonnie... She was awake. He could feel her bad mood passing through him from the nape of his neck right down into his bladder. He could hear her pitter patter footsteps coming down the stairs.

The Nun's eyes went wide, and she froze, tense as a stretched out rubber band. Kol chuckled, cake crumbs going down the wrong way again…

This was going to be fun.

* * *

"Hey guys," Bonnie greeted them sheepishly, voice hoarse, as she came down the stairs. Eyes all downcast and sad looking.

_'Hey guys,' his ass. _

Damon tightened his grip on Elena's hand.

He had had a good life. More or less.

Yes, he'd been on the wrong side of the civil war; yes, Katherine had played him for an ass; yes, his father had shot him through the heart; yes, he was technically a serial killer; yes, he was most likely going to hell when he died; but he'd had a good life… coming towards the end.

Sire bond or no, he'd won the girl. Maybe not the original girl, but the clone was serving just fine. She loved him, (sire-bond induced or otherwise) and that was enough.

He'd won. Stephan had lost.

Amen.

_Deliver us from evil, _he whispered mentally as Bonnie reached the bottom of the stairs. Her murderous aura filling the foyer like a thick, stifling smog.

If she'd been powerful before, he didn't know how to describe her now. More powerful. Like Tartarus made flesh... But at the same time, less. Like Discord in chains. Aphrodite, in chains. Some goddess or the other, but in chains...

She'd been crying apparently, the witch-girl cannibal, Bonnie. Crying tears of blood. He could see the dried tracks down her face. And some part of him wanted to lick her clean... like a mother cat licking the afterbirth off its litter.

_She's still Bonnie, _Klaus had said, _she's just been adapting to a new power. We've all gone on benders from time to time. You're Damon, the Demon of the Mississipi. Your brother's the Ripper, and me… well, I'm Klaus. So let's give the girl a chance. She's only human…_

Only human his ass, but Elena had wanted to go. Because they were _sisters_. And soft-hearted Stefan was an idiot, and Jeremy had an IQ of zero, so there they were, trying to pretend that the girl hadn't turned into a cannibal elf that ate, _ate,_ repeat_ ate,_ the population of Mystic Falls, most notably Caroline and Tyler.

They were all going to die.

_Wait and see._

Elena shook free of his grip and rushed up to embrace the demon girl Bonnie. "Oh God, Bonnie!" I knew it wasn't really you. It was Silas. Silas hypnotized you into doing what you did. It wasn't you're fault!"

Bonnie returned the embrace, tightened it. "I'm so sorry."

_Was she?_

"It's not your fault!"

"I should have been stronger…" Bonnie said, blood tears bursting the dam once more. "I should have known."

"You couldn't know," Elena continued, the two girls swaying in each other's arms. "It's all right. Everything's all right now."

Nothing was ever going to be all right again, but maybe that was him just being cynical and pessimistic. He left the two girls reconciling on the couch - Elena trying to cheer Bonnie up, Bonnie, running out of tissues to keep her face dry.

In truth, he felt a twinge of pity for the girl.

When he had first changed, he'd… he'd done so many despicable things. There'd been days when he hadn't known himself. Days when he'd wake up surrounded by pools of blood and dead bodies. He'd killed men. He'd killed women. And hell, when he was hungry enough, he'd killed his fair share of children.

He'd never _eaten a baby,_ but he could relate to the chaos that results when you flip the switch.

And he felt a little sad for her. Just the way he felt a little sad for himself.

People like him and Klaus and Stefan could live with being monsters. They were accustomed to it. A small part of them took pride in it. That's what set them apart from all the sheep in the world. But poor Bonnie Bennett had only ever wanted to be one of the sheep. She'd only ever wanted to be good, and pure… To stay near the shepherd.

And they'd all turned their backs on her and left her alone in the darkness.

He strolled over to the bar, let Klaus pour him a jug of vodka and lime. "Well, she's making progress."

Klaus shrugged. "One day at a time."

"And the birthday party, that was all you?"

"Why?"

Damon shrugged, "Well, seeing as she killed and ate all her friends excepting us… I hope you're not planning on more people showing up, because, hint, hint, wink, wink, their rotting maggot-riddled corpses are liquefying on the asphalt as we speak."

"That explains the scent then. I thought somebody'd farted." Kol slid onto the bar-stool next to him with a cherry smile. "Cake?"

_Why not?_ Really, why not? Damon took the offered saucer. Took the cherry, twirled it around in his mouth wishing it was a nipple instead. Elena's, preferably. Or anybody else's, to tell the truth. He'd rather be sucking on a _guy's_ nipples than playing fairy dollhouse with psycho-cannibal Bonnie and psycho-jackass Klaus and general-psycho Kol.

_Val Kilmer's nipples… _

The he noticed the Nun.

Of course there'd be a Nun at the cannibal's birthday party. Maybe there was a unicorn out back… that she'd eat when she was finished with the cake.

She was pretty, though, the Nun, for a blind girl. Young. Nymphy…

Any other day when his life wasn't in danger, he'd make a pass at that. Instead, he took another fork of cake - a large mouthful. Spitting crumbs all over the counter, talking over the heinous blasting '_Itchin on a Photograph', _"You guys got her back to normal, Kudos!"

Kol smirked, "That's all Klaus. I'm just a spectator in this madness." A small chuckle. "Same as you."

Damon doubted, _really _doubted that.

* * *

"Ooh," Bonnie squealed as she unwrapped Stefan's gift. "It's so beautiful."

It wasn't all that beautiful. Just some random heirloom that Stefan had kept hoarded up in his chamber of secrets. Their mother's Nouveau Cherubs Jewelry Case that he'd dusted off and polished up. Worth about two hundred bucks on the antique market. Definitely wasn't worth all the gushing and fawning.

Damon sat uncomfortably on the arm of an armchair watching the cannibal hug his little brother.

_Fifty bucks, she rips his throat out…_

After all, She _had _killed Caroline. And _eaten _Tyler_. _

That had happened.

It would be recorded in the annals of history that Bonnie had killed and eaten the entire population of Mystic Falls.

Or maybe it was all in his mind, the way Stefan was stroking the girl's hair, patting her back… So consoling. Always Stefan, the good understanding brother.

And maybe he did understand.

The sickening thud Andie had made when she hit the floor resounded in Damon's ears, and brought a little bile up in his throat.

Of course, Stefan would understand. He had a PhD in senseless violence. A masters in coming out a shit-storm sunny side up. He could maybe tutor Bonnie right back into being her hypocritical, almighty, righteous, judgmental self. _So what if you murdered a couple people? You're a good person. You have to believe that. Believe in yourself. Never mind all the people who call you cannibal. They're just trying to bring you down. You're a good girl. You're a good girl, Bonnie._

Bonnie wiped her face in Stefan's shirt, staining it with her blood. "Oh, Stefan," her voice all choked up. "I screwed up so bad."

"It's okay, Bonnie. We're still here for you."

She sank into his arms again, holding on to him for dear life. "I killed my friends…"

"It's okay."

Damon vomited a little in his throat. _Okay, his ass._

She sniffled snot back up her nostrils, that was kinda of cute but mostly irritating to Damon. Psycho cannibals shouldn't get to have a good cry and a happy birthday party. They shouldn't be forgiven. They shouldn't be consoled. They should be put down. ASAP.

"I don't even know how–" she shrugged out of Stefan's arms. "I can't even understand you guys being able to look at me and not be utterly disgusted."

He wouldn't say _disgusted..._

A– Because she was basically in her underwear. The shirt was thin as cobweb and it seemed as though she'd started at the bottom, made her way two buttons up, then decided, _fuck_ _it_.

B– She'd said _fuck_ _it_ to pants as well and he could see at least half her ass. Which he wasn't complaining about, just mentioning...

And C– She had a decent body, he'd admit grudgingly. Exceptional thighs, exceptional cleavage. A belly he just wanted to lick the sweat off of. A neck he just wanted to bite.

So no, he was not _utterly _disgusted. Just a little bit pissed off. And a little bit confused as to what the general fuck was going on. Klaus and Kol and the cannibal were now living in the Lockwood house? With a nun? They _weren't_ working on a master plan to kill her anymore? Were they all going to pretend her chainsaw massacre hadn't just happened last week? Had she or had she not had elf ears and fangs? Because he could swear, the last time he saw her she was more beast than girl, snarling for Jeremy's guts. His literal guts.

Jeremy was next up. And he put Stefan to shame. Petting, cuddling, soothing… You'd hardly remember that he'd cheated on her with a ghost. You'd hardly think that he had volunteered to be the chief executor of the "Emergency Kill Bonnie" plan. He didn't skip a beat into falling back into Best Boyfriend mode. Peppering her face with the most disgusting display of affection Damon had ever born witness to.

_Yeah, just go ahead and make out with the cannibal._

Jeremy's gift. A framed photo of the two of them taken from their prom night. Both of them dressed to kill, posing midair as they'd bounced on the trampoline Caroline had stated was absolutely necessary in _any_ serious senior prom.

_Oh sweet airheaded Barbie girl… _He kinda missed her.

She would have just _loved_ Klaus' and Kol's birthday bash. All the balloons. The confetti. God, the freaking bubble machine…

_Remember Caroline_, Damon wanted to scream. _Remember when Mystic Falls used to have living people in it?_

Damon's gift was next. A huge, big box with a bow on top.

The girl stared at it, then at him, squinting her eyes a little… As if _he _was the suspicious one in the room.

Then she unwrapped it.

A teddy polar bear. With red corn syrup strategically splattered over it. And a placard in its hand, _"Please don't eat me."_

No one laughed.

"It's a joke," Damon explained, trying to lighten the atmosphere. "They're endangered," he chuckled. "Melting ice caps… Not that it's begging _you _not to eat it. Not like you've ever eaten a polar bear before. Cats, babies, puppies, raccoons, frogs, the old people in the hospice, and the actual mountain lion we had that never actually killed anyone," he paused for a breath "Caroline, the jock, Meredith, everybody else at the hospital, everybody at the Grill plus or minus Matt, your dad, Lucy, April and the rest of Rebekah's morbid gossip girl clique, everybody at your high school, and basically every human in Mystic Falls, except for the Sheriff who Klaus handled for you." He cut her a smirk, "But you didn't kill any polar bears, did you? I mean, between hiding out in the church and gift shopping for your Sweet Eighteen, I haven't had the chance to check the zoo manifest, but I'm just assuming that with all the fur–"

"No Damon, let not your heart be troubled," Klaus cut in with his smirking, happy face, "The polar bear community is intact and thriving."

"Nice to know."

And the tears were starting again. Big drops of heavy red blood trickling down her cheeks. "So this is what it feels like, huh? Having the shoe on the other foot? Yes, Damon, my death toll is higher than yours. Go on, judge. Your turn."

_Okay?_ So somehow _he_ was the asshole?

_Seriously?_

Klaus swiveled around and came to lean on the back of the couch where Bonnie and Elena were sitting. "Now, let's not spoil the fun, love–"

_Fun?_

"No he's right," Bonnie wiped at her eyes. "I can make all the excuses in the world. I was tricked. I was hypnotized. I was brainwashed. I was compelled. I was a gullible fool, and I made everybody that I loved suffer. I don't get to have a party and eat ice-cream like it's no biggie. I fucked up. I can admit that. I fucked up on an epic scale, and even if you guys say that you forgive me, and I know that deep down in your hearts you might really want to, but there's no way you're ever really going to forget what I've done."

For one thing, he didn't like the way Klaus was hovering over his girl (sire-bonded or otherwise).

And the second thing, he could almost _taste_ the murder in the air. The girl was reeking murder.

Third, he really wasn't liking Elena reaching out to grab the girl's hand. _This is not going to end well_.

* * *

Pretty, doe-brown eyes brimmed up dispelling the tension in the room and making Damon feel like an ass-hat. "Bonnie, it's okay. You're a witch."

_Ahem,_ he'd known over a hundred witches and _none_ of them had ever gone cannibal. In fact, most were vegetarians.

"You're not in control of everything you do," Elena continued her spiel of sympathy, which to Damon was undeserved. If you asked him, Bonnie actually seemed to be annoyed by it. She was doing that thing she did with her eyes when she was annoyed.

Fuck the tears and the whole '_Woe is Me'_ act.

Cannibal is a cannibal is a cannibal.

The queen of naivety would not stop. "There's always the spirits trying to get you to do what they want. And all the forces of nature, and then Silas. Us. All of this… We all had it coming. We put so much pressure on you. You've done so much for each and every one of us. I made you kill my uncle John in order to keep me alive, and half a year later, guess what? I still died. You died! You actually killed yourself to keep me from turning into a vampire, and guess what? But you never stopped trying, because you're Bonnie." Big brown eyes met bloody green ones. "You're my sister. And sisters look out for each other. Sisters watch each other's backs." She smiled happily, truly believing, in whatever world that she lived in, whichever planet, whichever realm of existence, which ever cloud, whichever rainbow, that the Bonnie in front of her was the Bonnie that they used to know.

"I'm with you, Bonnie, even if you're an evil witch. Even if you grow warts and start riding a broomstick. See," she brought forth the basket with the black kitten in it. "I got you a familiar, to help you channel your power. You're a badass witch who was meant to do great things. You've already done great things. One bad deed doesn't cancel out who you are."

_One_ bad deed? Killing Mystic Falls counted as _one_ bad deed?

"One bad week doesn't negate an entire lifetime of selflessness. And goodness. And purity. You have a destiny ahead of you that's more important than Mystic Falls. And I loved Caroline, but if I had to choose between the two of you, I'd always pick you. There's nothing you can do, nobody you can kill, to make me hate you. You might have scared the shit out of me, but I can't hate you. I love you. I can't repeat it enough, might as well make you a mixed tape. Like we used to do when I slept over at your grams and she let us play with the microphones. I just want you to know that no matter what, I'm with you, okay? Everybody in the house loves you. Unconditionally. Every single one of us, we all owe our lives to you."

Bonnie nodded, wiping furiously at her tears. She took a deep breath, and sighed. Matched Elena's smile with one of her own… A smile that was _just_ shy of deranged. "I love you, Elena."

Elena handed her the basket. "I love you, too. Forever. No matter what."

Bonnie plucked up the little kitten, stroking its fur… Shiny glossy black fur, cute soft pink-padded feet. No real though had gone into it, despite Elena's oration. There'd been a litter behind the boarding house that he'd been meaning to leave at some kid's doorstep. Klaus hadn't given them much time to go shopping for the birthday bitch, so he'd convinced Elena that nothing said _"I love you"_ better than furry newborn animals.

_Yeah..._

Bonnie held it up, inspecting it... _For fleas? Mites..._

And then, out of the blue, but not really, quick as a rattlesnake high on cocaine and Gatorade, she broke the thing's neck.

Not just broke it, but wrung it around. All the way around until it faced the other direction.

Then she tossed the furry, disfigured carcass over her shoulder and frowned. "I'm not really a cat person, Elena."

_As he'd expected._

Damon swallowed and even the sound of the saliva moving down his throat was audible in the eerie, unnerving silence that descended suddenly and filled the house like a gas bomb. _Yup_. They were all going to die.

"Lol," Kol drawled from his stool at the bar, sipping alcohol from an ice cream cone. Smirk, well in place. Eyes, crinkled up in delight.

* * *

Just for the sake of it, Damon decided to make a run for the door.

Of course there would be a magical barrier preventing his escape, but he still had to try. As a self-respecting, descent, near two hundred year old vampire with common sense and an intact adrenaline response system, he had to try.

And, of course, he ran smack into her invisible wall.

"Really?" Bonnie twisted her face in disbelief, "Come on Damon, you know me better than that. I'm _diligent, _remember?"

_God, _despite going crazy, she had good memory. How many months ago had he teased her about being more diligent? Getting her magic back to open the tomb of Silas. Told her that candle-lighting wouldn't cut it anymore…

Damon straightened his shirt. Checked his five hundred dollar Rolex watch. _Time of death…_

Stefan, always one step behind, made his move. Always the pacifist, (except when in Ripper mode), he attacked her with words.

Always effective,_ rationalizing _with evil psycho bitch demons_. Yeah, Stefan, you go for it._

"Bonnie, what's going on?" Stefan got off the coffee table he'd perched his ass on, shifting from casual to pensive guru mode in under ten seconds. The eyes became soul-searching. The forehead became creased with concern. His voice went all smoky seductive. "Bonnie, what are you doing?"

_What do you fucking think? _

Bonnie jumped off the couch as if it was in fire. She wavered a little bit on her feet though.

Noticed by Klaus, as well.

Kol too.

She compensated the gaff, with a snotty smirk, and dusted herself off of any imaginary pollutants the innocent baby cat had soiled her with.

Elena stared dear-eyed at the girl who used to be her sister. "You don't have to do this, Bonnie, whatever you're thinking about."

Bonnie twisted a curl out of her snow white hair, "_Whatever I'm thinking about..._ That's a euphemism if I ever heard one, but I only passed English because Shane hypnotized Kubrick into giving me an A, so I might not be using the word right." Enunciating as if she had really never used the word before, "_Euphemism...", _she said, then raked her fingers through her hair, sighing, "Any fucking how you look at it, I'm going to kill one of you guys. Or all of you. It's my birthday after all and I can kill who I want, can't I?" She smiled something sweet and twisted.

The way he'd smile sometimes at a pulsing pretty girl in the Grille.

"You don't want to this, Bonnie," Stefan preached. "I understand what you're going through. I know what you're trying to accomplish with this." Stefan's hands went out toward the girl as if he was Mother Theresa and she was some street urchin who needed you to donate a dollar a day. "I've been exactly where you are right now. You feel as if you've fallen so far down the hole that maybe it's best that you just keep digging away at it. That maybe you'll come out on the other side of the world where everything and everybody is upside down just like you. Because there's no way that you could ever go back to being the person you used to be. You don't even remember what she was like. She's just some obsolete version. Like Windows 95. You're Windows 8.5 and you think that we'd never be able to understand anything about you. The new you thinks that you don't have a place in our lives anymore. But that's not true. You're one of us Bonnie. No matter what."

"No matter what," Elena echoed.

"We love you, Bonnie." Jeremy's contribution. "I love you. I'd die for you. You know that! We-"

Klaus put a finger on the boy's lips, in that ambiguously gay way of his, silencing the Mighty Hunter that Damon had spent a shitload of hours training. The Mighty Hunter that had sneak attacked Elijah. The Mighty Hunter who was always getting by with a little help from his friends. And people who tolerated his existence for Elena's sake.

"As much as I love openhearted confessions of love, now's not the time, darling." Ever the English gentleman, Klaus. "Rather, you should be thinking about _last _words. Something poignant to put on your tombstone, hmm?" Pause. "Assuming there's enough of you left for a burial. And assuming that there'll be someone left standing who cares enough to bury you."

The fucking Klaus.

"_Let's give the girl a chance," _he'd said_. _

_"She's only human," _he'd said.

The fucking sadist had led them out of the stables and into the abattoir, and they had followed, wagging their stub tails behind them like blind sheep with Down's Syndrome.

They had left the one place where they _knew_ they were safe to come to the one place where _he_ knew they were _not_ safe.

_What happens when you surround yourself with idiots… _he supposed. Stefan had always been an idiot. Jeremy had always been a useless dick. And Elena… What was she other than a girl who looked like someone he'd loved for a century and a half? It wasn't her brains and keen intellect that had made him want to fuck her. Just her face really…

And now he was going to die. Like a pussy-whipped retard.

Outplayed by Klaus, the most epic, treacherous jackass under the sun, and Bonnie the Inept, who he'd known from _Day_ _One _was a bitch in witch clothing.

"Fine," Damon slumped into the armchair carelessly. "Can you get this over with and kill me first? This party sucks ass. The music. The company…"

Honestly, he admired whoever came up with the playlist. If his death had to be set to music, he didn't mind a little Seal.

"_But we're never gonna survive, unless  
We get a little crazy_  
_No we're never gonna survive, unless_  
_We are a little crazy…"_

Talk about crazy. Judge Dread Bitch was just a big bagful of crazy, with her crazy-ass tears of blood, and that smile… and the semi-see-through shirt…

She blotted her eyes for the umpteenth time in the shirt that used to be white. She threw her hands up in frustration "I'm so confused-"

Stefan, "It's okay, we–"

"-as to how to kill you," she finished. "I never really got to make any of the life and death decisions. You guys usually handled that… so I'm a little inexperienced when it comes to choosing who gets to live and who gets to die…"

* * *

Kol retrieved a fresh cone, filled it with whip cream and threw some sprinkles on top. He offered the Nun a bite, and she took a small lick at it with her cute pink squirrel tongue.

_God, _she was cute_._

As innocent as Bonnie's little bow-tied baby rabbits.

And Bonnie, he couldn't keep his face serious for the life of him. When he'd first met her, she really hadn't been anything much. Just another girl in earth tones with a bad hairstyle and a weird face.

Now… He couldn't imagine a prettier, sexier, psycho killer. He _liked_ the weirdness of her face that made her look like she was always smirking. Always pissed off. Always ready to kill.

So much fun!

She was better at mass murder than anyone he'd ever met. Better than Rebekah, for certain. Better than him, even. Maybe.

On some random day, he'd like to challenge her to a massacre competition. One person take New York, the other LA, and see between the two off them, which story made Breaking News and who ended up relegated to the "_And in other news tonight…" _section.

Poor little southern black girl who'd been mentally enslaved by her white vampire friends… They made movies about shit like that. Stories about people making breakthroughs when the odds were against them.

He'd like to see Bonnie's movie. _From Handmaiden to Demon_, based on real events.

Rated MA. Of course. For the violence.

And maybe throw in a couple graphic sex scenes…

_Hmm… _His mind started wandering down a different road altogether.

It occurred to him, that he'd never in his life done the dirty with a witch before.

Which was odd.

* * *

"So here's how we're going to do it," Klaus announced like a schoolteacher to Elena and her two estranged lovers. Jeremy was by his lonesome, reduced to being a silent spectator in the party games for the moment, duct taped to a wicker chair. (When you can't compel? Brute force and duct tape always get it done). "We're going to have a vote,

How many centuries had it been since he'd actually taught a class… Too long.

Bonnie lounged on the settee sliding into her Lady Voldemort persona easily, watching on while he entertained her. He could see how tired she was I her eyes. See it in the way she was propped in the chair and the way her leg hung off it limp. See the tips of her toes gone blue.

"It's simple. You have two options for every question. If it's a yes, raise your hand. Simple as that. Majority wins. Understand?"

They all nodded.

"Alright, first question, and remember you've been sworn to the truth, the whole truth and nothing but. Here we are then, question number one. 'Do you want to all die together, in each other's arms maybe?"

Nothing. Not a single vote for that option. _Pity._

"Would you prefer if only one of you died, and the other two got to live out the rest of their eternal vampiric days in relative peace? Where I use the term relative peace rather loosely?"

Damon's hand shot up into the air… followed slowly by Stefan's. Klaus nodded, happy as a cat in a canary store. A cat actually _owning_ a canary story couldn't be happier, Klaus imagined. "Two to one," he drawled, savoring the goodness of the moment. "So there we have it, one of the three of you is going to die today. Here in this house. But who…" he crinkled up his eyes at his former best drinking buddy, the good old Ripper. "All for killing Stefan, hand's up."

Nothing.

And strangely enough he felt just the tiniest smidgen of relief. Stefan got to live to see another day… Why he should care – unknown. He'd only ever be a thorn in his side. Why he could never bring himself to pluck the thorn out and toss it away, was beyond him. Maybe something to do with his mind-numbing loneliness and irrational need to be surrounded by people even if said people wanted him dead. "All for Damon Salvatore, let's see some hands."

Stefan's hand went up slowly.

So much for putting bros before hoes. "One vote for Damon, what say you, Elena? What about your blue-eyed, lover and his born to be bad self?"

Elena spat at him. In his general direction at least. He got that she didn't do it a lot, spit at people. The trajectory was all off. And it was all saliva, no mucous to hold it together, give it body and momentum... "Damon," he turned with a smile to address the Salvatore he had never given much of an iota about. "It would appear that you are safe… But with Stefan safe as well, that just leaves Elena, and before we vote you have to keep in mind that if we can't resolve this democratically, I'm going to kill all of you… By default. So let's have it, shall we? All for the fair Elena! Show of hands."

* * *

He'd be lying if he said he didn't think twice about it.

First off, the first reason to pop into his mind – she wasn't Katherine. She didn't have a fucked up history involving running around the wilds of Bulgaria surviving anyway she could. She didn't have any of Katherine savvy, her wiles, her intellect, her sense of self-preservation... She didn't even fuck like Katherine. She was all about the receiving… They'd never played croquet together. They'd never gone on any walks through any garden, just looking at stars and being rebellious. She was just a seventeen year old girl who happened to look like the bitch he'd devoted his life to.

Second, she was only with him because she was sired to him. Nothing was real. They were just playing at being a couple. Playing at loving each other. It wasn't real.

That's when his hand went up.

Third, there'd be another one hopefully, somewhere out there in the world. Some other doppelganger he could seduce and fuck. And even if he couldn't find and _exact _clone, he could always find someone with a close resemblance.

Fourth. He wanted to live.

Fifth. He'd had it up to his fucking _eyeballs_ with keeping Elena alive.

Sixth. They were only in this House of Horrors because of her, and her nonsense talk of _sisters_ and _good hearts_ and _forgiveness_.

Seventh. She was sired to him, and she'd raise her hand and make it two to one in favour of her dying, leaving him and his brother alive. If he had to chose, say a cannibal and two Originals had compelled him to chose between Elena and his brother... he'd have to go with Stefan. Albeit he was a brooding, sad, immoral fucking hypocrite, but family was family...

* * *

"Well, wonders never cease," Klaus whispered, more to himself than anyone else. If it hadn't been for the years he'd spent studying psychiatry, he'd have been stumped. The idea of it ever happening might have driven him insane. If he wasn't such an experienced master at back-stabbing and being back-stabbed, he really would have been sincerely stumped.

After all the sacrifices, after all the mayhem and death... They'd killed Gloria for the girl. Greta, Maddox, Mindy... Bonnie's grandmother... Bonnie's mother...

And yet, there he had it. Two hands in the air. One of them Damon's. One of them Stefan's.

_Way to cut your losses... _

Kol was cackling like a jacked up hyena.

He would have laughed too if it wasn't so utterly sad. "Looks like it's settled, darling,"

A solemn silence hung in the air, as it slowly began to dawn on Elena that her two lovers, the past one and the current one, had nominated her for the death sentence.

"Bonnie," was all the girl said, trying Stefan's tactic. "Take off the compulsion. Please. Don't make them do this!" big brown eyes pleading with the girl who used to be her sister.

Little did she know that that girl never really existed at all. The Bonnie she used to know was just the trial version. Limited features. Limited capabilities. A limited capacity.

This new Bonnie was soft, but only on the inside. Silas had turned her inside out. Brought out the demon and put away the angel.

Bonnie shrugged her shoulders, face stoically hard with only sad smile painted on. "Don't blame me, Elena. This is what _they_ decided. I've never pretended to understand how their process works, we just have to abide. Don't we? I mean, shit happens, right? Somebody has to draw the short straw at some point in time, turns out it's just your turn today. Klaus?"

"Yes, love?"

"Get on with it, yeah?"

"Oh, I was thinking we could have a little more fun with it."

* * *

Really?

Damon stared at the coin and then back to the laughing eyes of the hybrid.

He'd never really had much of a grasp on what happened behind those icy blue eyes, but he was starting to gleam a little more about how those gears worked now. The man enjoyed chaos. He loved the smell of smoke and blood in the air. Her was something old. Something that had never really been human. Something that couldn't quite comprehend the core concept of good and evil. Something that didn't understand the difference between right and wrong. Understood the meaning of the words, maybe, the idea behind them, maybe, but not the core concept.

He was the moth that flew into the fire just to feel the heat on its wings. The type who'd enjoy an actual blood bath. The type who couldn't rest easy unless something was burning down, unless someone was screaming.

And maybe at some point he'd been something that could pass as a living human thing, but after a thousand years, he was all monster.

"Heads or tails, sweetheart?" Klaus asked him again.

* * *

Damon turned his gaze on the cannibal girl that used to be Bonnie.

Yes, he and Stefan had flipped a coin over which one of them was going to kill her.

But he'd never told her about it. He and Stefan had never spoken about that little event, and in the end, he'd made the right call and killed the wayward mother instead.

Bitch ought to be grateful, the way he figured.

Bitch ought to suck on a dick until she shocked on it.

"Your dick's too small to pull something like that off," she said, blowing a raspberry like a twelve year old who didn't get the memo that Halloween was over. "Heads or tails, Salvatore? Fucking choose already. It took you just a couple of seconds to call it when it was _my_ life on the line... And I know Elena's special and you love her more than life itself but I don't have all day."

* * *

"Heads," Stefan murmured, eyes downcast. Voice defeated.

Tired.

* * *

Kol watched the coin as it sailed through the air in slow motion. Heads... Tails... _However would it land..._

__his brother caught it.

Covered it.

And slowly...

* * *

There was a God indeed, Klaus realised as the coin came down tails.

The only sad thing about it was that he'd not be making any more hybrids anytime soon, but it'd be many a year before he forgot the look of pure horror on Damon's face.

He'd make a sketch when he got time...

He turned to the birthday girl, "Any special way you had in mind, or a good old heart-yanking?"

"You could bash her brains in with a big red brick, but that'll leave a mess, and there's already enough of a mess outside. No need for blood and guts on this carpet." Bonnie yawned, looking a little bored now, in addition to fatigued. "Let's..." she stretched, then she perked up suddenly, eyes bright and shining like stars. She smiled, grinning from ear to ear, and Klaus found himself smiling too, just because… "Oh, I know, let's tie her to a stake in the yard, and then, Damon, you'll douse her down with gasoline, light a match and set her on fire."

The blood drained from Damon's face.

"Remember?" Bonnie twinkled, "Like how they killed Emily? Your slave witch? The one who made your daywalker rings? Whose descendants you promised to protect? Descendants like Bree? And me?" she waited for an answer to her rhetorical question for a moment, then nodded, "Yeah, let's have a Southern bonfire, it'll be fun. For me, at least. And Kol."

"I _live_ for bonfires, darling" the original toasted with a flute of champagne from his swivelling stool at the bar, the Nun perched right next to him.

Bonnie clapped her hands together, "There we have it. Settled then."

* * *

He'd had been at his fair share of bonfires, but there'd been something special about Elena's.

Bearing witness to the girl going up in a screaming burst of ash and smoke. Priceless.

The only sad thing, was that it was over all too soon.

Elena died… and then nothing happened. The disappointment was etched onto everyone's face. Bonnie's. Kol's. His…

He'd tried to imagine that it was Sweet Katerina who was screaming her lungs out over the roar of the flame, but he couldn't really get off on it, and in the end all that remained was a pile of hot debris and a sooty front lawn.

_Sigh._

Stefan had taken it rather well. Klaus had expected the full range of waterworks and angsty brooding. Rage at least, but more than anything, Stefan just seemed exhausted.

Damon had tossed the lighter at the girl without a single tear in his eye. Kudos for him, he hadn't looked away. Not for a moment. He'd just stood there, watching the so-called love of his life go up in flames.

Which was just tragic for Klaus. He and Kol had had a little side bet running that Old Bright Eyes would jump into the fire after Elena…

He'd have to hand over the keys to his new Bugatti. Bummer, that.

And Jeremy…

He wasn't exactly sure what the boy had said or done or thought to offend Bonnie, but one minute he was there, right as rain, strapped down tight on his wicker chair... and the next, he was an explosion of blood, guts and brain. And Wicker.

And duct tape.

So there it was that they were all sitting on the porch steps, watching the embers fade to nothing, watching the ashes of Elena blow away to cover the streets of Mystic Falls, watching the remnants of Jeremy drip off the bird bath… when he thought that as far as birthdays and birthday parties went, he'd done a hell of a job. No complaints for Bonnie. She didn't seem as happy as he'd anticipated, but she was sitting next to him, and he could tell that he'd helped chip away a little of that burden she'd been shouldering.

"What now?" Stefan asked, voice heavy.

"Go lock yourselves in the basement." He'd deal with the two of them after. Silas, by reputation could raise the dead. The possibility of Elena being raised back to life ought to be incentive enough to keep them on good behaviour...

But he'd negotiate that later. In the meanwhile, he just wanted them out of the way.

* * *

So there it was that he and his baby brother and a mystical Nun and Bonnie Bennett were sitting on the porch steps, watching the embers fade to nothing, watching the ashes of Elena blow away to cover the streets of Mystic Falls, watching the remnants of Jeremy drip off the bird bath…

"What now?" Bonnie asked, voice light, but with a little tremble to it. _Cold._

Frosty.

She nudged Klaus with her shoulder, "Want to finish the night off with a round of good hard fucking?"

Kol coughed on his beer.

He really had to think about it this time. Napoleon had said that men were moved by only two levers. Fear and self-interest. How right he was.

He ruffled her snow white hair playfully, wanting to run his fingers along her scalp and trace the shape of her face under his fingertips. "If first things come first, second things must follow. How about we go fuck Silas instead?"

Bonnie chuckled grimly. "Technically, I've already done that, but okay. That'll work."

"Ready to go inside?" he asked.

She took a final look at the smoke and ash in the air. Inhaling the remnants of their havoc. "Carry me?"


End file.
